Images are ubiquitous in the everyday lives of twenty-first century students. But do these students, boys and girls, know how to use them? Although school programs seem to emphasize the importance of "image education", several studies show that in many classrooms, images are still relegated to the role of in-text illustrations. This article describes a project set up in a fifth-grade class in Montreal in 2015. During the study, we offered students a series of activities, taking advantage of a particular type of image: the photograph. We chose to use the photograph in three ways: as a historical source, as evidence of research on the history of the neighbourhood, and finally as a way to capture the students' initial understandings of the concept of ‘heritage’. This last approach led us to observe that, for these students, heritage is understood to consist of inscriptions and architectural items that they understand as "old".