In the past few years we have heard that new technologies associated to information and image production and circulation are responsible for some kind of contemporary life revolution; underlining social activism, as well as the way we relate socially. Indeed transformations occurred, but we can not think of a deterministic relationship between technology and social changes attributed to it. We show in this paper that technologies impose only as they find an audience that will either accept them or that is somehow prepared to receive them. Insofar as it appears neutral or transparent. Thus, we turn our attention to the role of society in the endorsement of photography as a modern social representation, being photography the scope of this paper. We tried to show three different moments; the ways of seeing, its practices and social conventions, as well as the way social subjects display themselves. At first have investigated the forms of representation from the earliest images found inside caves like Lascaux and Altamira, until the advent of photography. Next we show how the photographic process is publicly presented as democratic, natural and independent of the hand of the artist. We highlight that it is the use of photography by political power and the circulation in newspapers and magazines that actually validates it as a dominant form of social representation. The use of photography as identification and surveillance document, combined with capitalist forms of production and industrialization of the process of representation, identify photography as a typical product of modernity. At last, we have looked for the influences of economic and social transformations on the photographic representation, during what has been called post-modern period, that culminated in the so-called digital revolution. We show that in fact this passage was not so radical as it happened gradually, respecting the logic of the market, presenting news in calculated doses with eyes on consumer behavior.