This dissertation narrates an ethnographical research, dealing with the life history of a community, Córrego dos Januários, located in a small village in the countryside of Minas Gerais. This place, as many others throughout Brazil, has faced radical changes in its day-to-day living, triggered by the recent arrival of electricity and television, compromising the history and memory of its inhabitants. Through a theoretical/methodological strategy, based mainly on concepts from Walter Benjamin and Mikhail Bakhtin, we seek to comprehend this process. As a researcher and photographer, I try to listen to and narrate the life which pulses and emerges in the tales and images of the Januários, while aiming to construct with them the trails of memory so that the link which makes them subjects of and in the history is not broken.