This essay highlights the role played by illustrated magazines in Chile during the first decades of the 20th century, in shaping the national imaginaries circulating in the country. These journals would have conveyed an idea and an image of a country with certain exceptional characteristics for the Latin American sphere, aspects that not only would deeply mark idiosyncratic aspects of the national community, but would also have impacted on how this community would begin to relate to the media and their formats of representation of reality.