Founded in 1923, the Republic of Turkey tasked itself with forming a new Turkish nation, building upon the dynamics of the modernization efforts of the late Ottoman era. For the Kemalist elites, “reaching the level of modern civilizations”, per a popular motto of the time, would only be possible through secularization. The modern Turkish man and woman were primarily designed as urban middle-class model citizens, featuring a European outlook, from dress code to social etiquette. The making of the modern Turkish citizen as part of a modern nuclear family unit is reflected in the self-representations of family portraits in the 1920s and 1930s, giving us glimpses into the increasingly secularized public life and changing social landscape. Family pictures show us the ways in which the regime’s claims to modernity might have been negotiated and circulated in familial and collegial networks outside the realm of official media discourses. In this paper, through the study of vernacular photographs from the 1920s and 1930s, I examine how photographic production contributed to the production of modern urban Turkish middle-class femininities and masculinities in the founding years of the Republic, and how the newly minted citizens of a modern nation state made meaning out of the new regime.