By focusing on how image-making practices and architecture are inextricable from one another, this essay explores some ways in which the photograph is a site of architectural production. The postcard is seen as an artefact of popular cultures over time, and the author draws attention to its representation of fragments of urban and architectural modernity, while also simultaneously underscoring the uneven nature of such modernity. Studying the photographic gaze then becomes an important agenda in uncovering new histories of modernity that, rather than clear, colonial taxonomies and categories linked to places, races or societies, are contested and plural.