ABSTRACT
To discuss photography in the Americas is to undertake an unfathomable task – just to focus on some of its specific features would imply the research of a deep and vast field. Since its arrival in the continent, photography has become an effective recording medium, which has resulted in a broad range of uses and social functions that followed European canons, especially the French ones. The interest of the explorers extended to ethnography; the work of Lumholtz is one of the main examples of ethnographic scientific interest through images. In addition to photography’s realistic replication feature, its other main definition axis is its capacity for reproduction and dissemination, which enabled the leap to the currently experience. Photography entered diverse scientific fields such as sociology, which incorporated it as part of its research of different social situations; for example, the work of Lewis W. Hine on the conditions of child labor in factories, which served afterward as a social denouncement.
