It is impossible to get a photograph of a black hole. Top of my science class ftw? A black hole is an object with a gravitational field so powerful that a region of space becomes cut off from the rest of the universe - no matter or radiation (including light) that has entered the region can ever escape. As not even light can escape, black holes appear black (resulting in the name for these objects). While the idea of an object with gravity strong enough to prevent light from escaping was proposed in the 18th century, black holes as presently understood are described by Einstein's theory of general relativity, developed in 1916. This theory predicts that when a large enough amount of mass is present within a sufficiently small region of space, all paths through space are warped inwards towards the center of the volume. When an object is compressed enough for this to occur, collapse is unavoidable (it would take infinite strength to resist collapsing into a black hole). When an object passes within the event horizon at the boundary of the black hole, it is lost forever (it would take an infinite amount of effort for a rocket to climb out from inside the hole). Although the object would be reduced to a singularity, the information it carries is not lost. While general relativity describes a black hole as a region of empty space with a pointlike singularity at the center and an event horizon at the outer edge, the description changes when the effects of quantum mechanics are taken into account. The final, correct description of black holes is unknown (it requires a theory of quantum gravity). What I'm trying to prove is that it is not possible to get the light required to get a photograph of a black hole, unless you were outside the event horizon, which can be miles in diameter, so you still couldn't get the light to travel to that point.