The intense changes that occurred in the cities of Buenos Aires and Rio de Janeiro in the passage from nineteenth to twentieth centuries were theme to the lenses of many photographers. Although they sought to capture in the most faithful and accurate possible way the observed realities, their productions always played with the ambivalence between record and interpret. With this, they created images that not only reflected but elaborated new ways of imagining, seeing and feeling those cities that are altered rapidly, creations of a time that seemed increasingly faster. The aim of this thesis is to analyze the ways in which the photography had elaborated seizures on the same urban modernity that created it, through fragments that constructed a kind of album of the development of cities. Analyzing Rio de Janeiro and Buenos Aires comparatively, I seek to understand how photography functioned, at the same time, as a mean to perpetuate the new that emerged and the old that was disappearing, containing in itself a temporal tension when dealing with continuities, ruptures and transformations both in the physical spaces of the urban area as in the customs and ways of using these spaces for the urbanites.