Militão Augusto de Azevedo had worked in the city of São Paulo, among the years of 1865 and 1885, and he left us a great photographic collection. Nowadays this collection is under the care of the Museu Paulista da USP. The present article has as objective to present part of this material. For such we shimmered a lot of images that can exemplify some forms of representation about the African population into São Paulo city’s context, in the last years of the slavery. So, we come into the peculiar universe of photographer Militão, a professional that shows us many peculiar lines and whose participation happened with a lot of proximity of the structural process of this segment of Brazilian social context. This also reaffirms the importance of the cartes de visite in this process, that reinforces the thesis that the photography in the last years of 19th century, is a fundamental instrument for the statement (and reaffirmation) of social positions.