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In the 1960s, in Soviet Latvia, architects and town planners armed with cameras roamed the urban fringes which they were tasked with re-imagining. Based on a corpus of 300 photographs, this article documents these field surveys and the conditions under which the images were produced and used. It reveals the possibilities that photography provides, within an authoritarian regime, to limit the stranglehold of the technocratic and bureaucratic State over professional practices.