This article addresses the issue of how images can become part of a legitimating discourse in processes of conquest. Specifically analyzed are the photographs of the portraitist Antonio Pozzo, who accompanied General Roca during the Desert Campaign in 1879. In this context photography is the bearer of a point of view that on the one hand testifies to the rawness of the experience and on the other has an imaginary potential on the symbolic plane, as it establishes new institutional myths from past images that become the constitutive memory of future nationality.