When was the first photograph of an exoplanet taken?

A major milestone in astronomy came in 2004, when astronomers announced one of the first direct images of an exoplanet: 2M1207 b. The planet orbits a brown dwarf in the constellation Hydra and was observed with the Very Large Telescope in Chile. Earlier indirect detections existed before that, but this was among the first direct photographs of a planet outside our solar system. Direct imaging is extremely difficult because exoplanets are faint and their stars are overwhelmingly bright.