One of the greatest limitations of an historian’s work is that he/she cannot corroborate by himself/herself the facts that he/she studies; at most, he/she can aim to such knowledge through the traces of remains of the past. In this sense, documents, conceived as any remain left by an event, are the basis of this paper and constitute their main methodological tool. Nevertheless, historian Jacques Le Goff states that these documents would be the result of the sustained effort by historical societies to impose towards the future a certain self-image. Therefore there would not exist a document that shows reality. Photography, in its documentary character, would not escape this sentence.

The aim of this paper is to analyse the use of photographic images of indigenous peoples from Tierra del Fuego in school texts and to detect the kind of subject constructed through such images.