I need to know the name of an item so I can locate images of it
online. At one time amusement parks like Coney Island and Atlantic
City's Boardwalk and venues like itinerant carnivals had photographers
who took humorous novelty shots of patrons. The subjects stood behind
a painted board or screen and fit their faces into holes cut out of
the material. The front of the board had a painted image of a
character or characters whose heads would be where the cutouts were.
So people could be photographed as 1920s bathing beauties, Keystone
Kops or whatever. What do you call that board or
screen with the painted character and hole for subject's head?

These boards do indeed have a proper name: "Comic Foregrounds"; the
problem is that hardly anyone seems to know or use that name.

"Comic Foreground" is what the inventor of these screens, the American
painter Cassius Marcellus Coolidge (1844-1934), named his invention.
But, as I already said, almost nobody uses or knows that proper name
anymore. Most people seem to prefer paraphrases.

By the way, C. M. Coolidge created the famous paintings of dogs playing poker.

Scriptor