In Brazil, throughout the 20th century, the photos published on magazine and newspaper pages shaped a visual public space in which suits and photos combined in the narrative of events. The city of Rio de Janeiro, the Brazilian capital until 1960, was the preferred place for institutionalisation of photographic practice, since the nineteenth century the main photographic studios and the publishing houses responsible for the circulation and marketing of printed matter were concentrated. In this article we discuss the public photo routes in contemporary Brazil. It focuses on the assessment of the production of a public visual space, highlighting three moments in which photographic practice is consolidated in weekly, daily and independent press spaces: the Caribbean magazines of the first half of the 20th century, with a focus on four magazines: ‘Careta’, ‘Revival of the Week’, ‘Fon-Fon’ and ‘O Cruzeiro’; the photojournalism of daily newspapers, ‘Jornal do Brasil’ and ‘Last Hora’, in the 1950s and 1960; and independent photographer agencies from the 1970s and 1980s, such as: Central, Angular, F4, AGIL Photojournalism, Fotocontext, among others, acting as important tools for documenting social movements, and promoting the consolidation of independent production, the practice of archiving originals and controlling the publication and dissemination of photographs. It is understood that public photography was forged in such spaces as one of the dimensions of the contemporary historical experience based on the technical image to plake its events. With a view to enquiring about how in each of these fields the story has been displayed, a roadmap is proposed, starting with a brief consideration on public photography and public visual space, followed by a reflection on the production of news in the illustrated weekly magazines, through the inclusion of events in the icons regime and reaching out to independent photographic practice. Conceptually, the photographic practice is understood in its ways of seeing, presenting and representing the social world as a founding historical experience of the contemporary western world. Social circuits and their uses and functions have multiplied in a visual economy supported by the technical image as a socially oriented production device. In methodological terms, it uses the historical analysis of the primary documentation in the database of the digital hemerotoire of the Brazilian National Library and the archives of the Laboratório de Historia Oral e Image of the Fluminense Federal University. The historical analysis is complemented by an assessment of the forms of communication and the power of significance of four photographs, highlighted from each of the historical periods analysed.