This paper explores the ambiguous position of Tunisian photographer and filmmaker Albert Samama-Chikly (1872–1934) during his tenure with the French Army’s film and photography service during the First World War. The adventurous son of a wealthy Jewish banker who had worked for the sovereign of Tunisia, Samama-Chikly harnessed a French education and national status to launch a career as a photojournalist around the turn of the twentieth century. But the outbreak of the Great War brought challenges to most North Africans, with hundreds of thousands forcibly recruited to serve in the French Army. Samama-Chikly, exempt from conscription perhaps due to his age or wealth, nonetheless enlisted voluntarily as a photographer and cameraman to capture scenes from the Western Front during some of the war’s most brutal campaigns. Samama-Chikly’s itinerary challenges monolithic conceptions of “Jewish,” “Tunisian,” and “Francophone” identities in the context of this colonial war. Little-studied (and not at all in Anglophone scholarship), his visual gaze has been dismissed as vain, detached, or simply a prelude to his pioneering films Zohra (1922) and Aïn el Ghazal (1924). Yet when interpreted within the wider context of his cosmopolitan, border-crossing life around the Mediterranean, I argue, Samama-Chikly’s wartime photographs reveal how WWI provoked a more diverse range of possibilities for North African politics and artistic expression.