  We present the photometric sample of a faint galaxy survey carried out in the
southern hemisphere, using CCDs on the 3.60m and NTT-3.5m telescopes at La
Silla (ESO). The survey area is a continuous strip of 0.2 deg x 1.53 deg
located at high galactic latitude (-83 deg) in the Sculptor constellation. The
photometric survey provides total magnitudes in the bands B, V (Johnson) and R
(Cousins) to limiting magnitudes of 24.5, 24.0, 23.5 respectively. To these
limits, the catalog contains about 9500, 12150, 13000 galaxies in B, V, R bands
respectively and is the first large digital multi-colour photometric catalog at
this depth. This photometric survey also provides the entry catalog for a
fully-sampled redshift survey of ~ 700 galaxies with R < 20.5 (Bellanger et al.
1995). In this paper, we describe the photometric observations and the steps
used in the data reduction. The analysis of objects and the star-galaxy
separation with a neural network are performed using SExtractor, a new
photometric software developed by E. Bertin (1996). The photometric accuracy of
the resulting catalog is ~ 0.05 mag for R < 22. The differential galaxy number
counts in B, V, R are in good agreement with previously published CCD studies
and confirm the evidence for significant evolution at faint magnitudes as
compared to a standard non evolving model (by factors 3.6, 2.6, 2.1). The
galaxy colour distributions B-R, B-V of our sample show a blueing trend of ~
0.5 mag between 21 < R < 23.5 in contrast to the V-R colour distribution where
no significant evolution is observed.
