In actual times and due to our complex visual culture it seems almost impossible to build a speech that allows piecing a social story through the image. Nevertheless, this reflection has been a constant in the main voices that write about social studies: John Berger, Armando Silva, Roland Barthes, Adrián Gorelik, Néstor García Canclini, Demetrio Brisset, Boris Kossoy, Justo Villafañe, Gisel Freund, and Susan Sontag among others. This article mentions some theoretical speeches of the before named voices, the importance of image as an historical document its affirmed, and an analysis of some contemporary artists and their photographic work is developed so it can be examined the dichotomical image in urban Latin-American culture: The ideal/positive city and the real/negative city.