On August 19th, the world photography day is celebrated, a fundamental tool for the imagery record of our society. If, on the one hand, photography is the protagonist in dialogues that involve architecture and the city, portraying historical moments and enhancing buildings, on the other hand, it guides us through the context and backstage of the moment, eternalizing the process.

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The first image recorded on paper was produced by Joseph Nicéphore Niepce, a French inventor born in 1765 who was interested in Leonardo Da Vinci’s teachings on the methods and effects of the camera obscura. At the beginning of the 19th century, after several painters and draughtsmen used the inverted image resulting from the camera obscura to reproduce reality in their drawings, The inventions and discoveries related to the Industrial Revolution made it possible to fix an image projected from this tool on paper or metal. At the beginning of the 19th century, using a wooden box pointed towards the garden and a chemically treated paper, Niepce managed to print the image of his backyard on the sheet, resulting in what is considered to be the first photograph in history – which had as its main object the architecture of a residential garden.

The technique improved over the course of the 19th and 20th centuries when prints began to be made on photographic paper and the technology of the devices also evolved. With the 21st century, printed photography fell into disuse and we finally reached the digital age, with digital cameras and cell phones. With its popularization, photography has become a tool both for recording iconic family moments and great historical scenes, as a means of perpetuating the banal, everyday life and context, becoming an almost investigative object of the past, which is also seen by the history of architecture. Besides recording the great buildings as objects and works of art to be admired, photography was also able to record the constructive processes of emblematic works.