These previously unpublished photographs were taken in the United States between 1880 and the late 1960s. Some of them promote troupes of travelling performers: the minstrel shows in which whites made up as blacks incarnated, in musical numbers, the ‘good coloured folk’ whose music Americans particularly appreciated (the origin of blues and jazz). Other pictures are souvenirs from private parties, birthdays, or carnivals where children and adults alike tried their hand at ‘blacking up’. These images make us question the development of the gaze that a certain America casts upon African Americans. All the more intensely because their aesthetic effect is powerful.