| Sumario: | In April 2019, the Event Horizon Telescope Collaboration released the first image of the shadow of a black hole. Starting off with its early history, and then moving on to these recent developments, we trace the concept of directness in black hole imaging. Throughout this history, "direct observation," "direct image," "direct evidence," and "direct visual evidence" were almost never defined and yet such notions came to be used to argue that imaging would be the most convincing evidence for the existence of black holes. Within the Event Horizon Telescope Collaboration, views about what directness entailed differed and revealed subtle differences between various stances on evidence and visuality. Following the study of directness in black hole imaging, we compare these uses of directness with cases from black hole research more broadly. From a philosophical perspective, "directness" is used to compare one observation to another, across dimensions of varying epistemological significance. This can have implications for the perceived prestige of the observations. However, any connection between directness and epistemological value is highly dependent on the details of both the observation itself and the notion of directness being deployed to describe it.
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