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This article examines the role of photography in the process of reuse of the mill Minetti & Gamba, located in the district of Mooca, an important deindustrialized area of the city of São Paulo, which undergoes a real state boom. The dispute among the State, the market and the inhabitants opposes their positions between complete and partial preservation. We will approach a dimension of this conflict that is manifest in the report of a real estate company, confronted against another report from a historical heritage institution. Based on the relationship between landscape and heritage, and the representational approach of the latter that reveals its connection to the visual perception, we will focus on how the specialist photographic practice produces a kind of rhetoric. This rhetoric mobilizes a “pedagogy of the gaze”, and gives an identity to the territory, through the notion of industrial landscape, and thus justify the full preservation of the Mill and its surroundings.