  The Canada-France Redshift Survey has been undertaken to provide a large
well-defined sample of faint galaxies at high redshift in which the selection
criteria match as closely as possible those of samples of nearby galaxies. The
survey is designed to have a median redshift of z ~ 0.6 corresponding to a
look-back time of half the present age of the Universe for Omega ~ 1. Such a
survey can then be used for studying many different aspects of the evolution of
galaxies over the interval 0 < z < 1. In this paper we describe the selection
of the fields, the multicolor imaging observations and the construction and
validation of the photometric catalogs. Particular attention is paid to
quantifying the unavoidable selection effects in surface brightness and their
impact on the survey is assessed in the context of the properties of known
populations of galaxies. The photometric catalogs contain several thousand
objects brighter than I_{AB}< 22.5 and are essentially complete for central
surface brightnesses as faint as $\mu_{AB}(I)$ $\sim$ 24.5 mag arcsec$^{-2}$.
This should be sufficient to include both normal surface brightness galaxies
and prototypes of extreme low surface brightness galaxies.
