In the first part of this presentation, I describe the history of the aesthetics of black holes. With the aim to look at a number of sources from different settings and periods describing the same astronomical object, I have studied a collection of visual and textual representations of black holes mainly focused on the period 1967–2019. I argue that we see primarily five (often overlapping) aesthetic framings of black holes in the history of black hole research and communication. On this background, I turn to my main case study, which is part of the collection and I have also studied it through fieldwork. This part of the presentation explores the image production and framing of the first image of the shadow of a black hole on the basis of observation, which was released by the Event Horizon Telescope Collaboration in 2019. Based on fieldwork and interviews with members of this collaboration's Imaging Group, I argue that the researchers express very subtle views of the aesthetics of their image production, often pointing to connections between aesthetics and epistemology. Such views, and the practices tied to them, give a different picture of aesthetics and image production in astronomy than what we see in existing accounts such as the influential 1988 paper by Lynch and Edgerton. I discuss how the study of the aesthetics of black holes compares to accounts of the aesthetics of other astronomical phenomena, and show how the Event Horizon Telescope Collaboration in particular presents new subtleties of astronomical image production as well as the intentions which lie behind visual practices.