This paper first discusses the current study of photography of Ottoman Empire. More specifically, most rightfully engage the subjects of our photographic archive as expressions of new class aspirations, the self-representation of new elites, and defining national and gender identity. To make these assertions, most scholars unquestionably accept certain visual indices as indicators of modernity. Most scholars reach out immediately to poses, studio backdrops and sartorial codes in the photographic portraiture as signifiers of the class or subjective position of the sitter. Therefore, the photographic image provides the viewer and scholar with an a priori internal representational metric to the photographic subject's relationship to modernity, national identity, gender or class affiliation. Second, the current research of scholars of Indian photography (e.g. Pinney) and African photography (e.g. Sprague and Olugu) read against the study of indigenous Middle Eastern photography challenges us to think whether photography participated in and/or documented alternatives to Western modalities of modernity and identity. If so, are we scholars using the correct representational framework to "read" these images such as looking for modernity, new class formations, new gender relations etc. in indices offered exclusively through dress Third, bringing these two sets of research together (the study of Middle Eastern and postcolonial photography), I insist that the social role and effects of photographic image, particularly that of portraiture, can only be gauged if read against the plethora of non-fiction and fiction of the era. The dissonance between the scholarship of Ottoman photography and alternative histories of photography of the colonial world can be understood when, simply said, the photographic archive is read within its own historical and local context, contexts disclosed through the Arab press, fiction and national treatises in Lebanon, Palestine and Egypt. Indigenously produced (studio and amateur) portraiture suggest less the emergence of alternative modernities in Southwest Asia than a profound epistemological phenomenon that accompanied the Tanzimat and the Arab Renaissance. That is, if we look beyond the manifest photographic content defined by poses, studio sets, and dress, we detect a latent content that demonstrates the rise of a radically new form of bourgeois individualism. National, confessional, communal and familial social formations will coagulate during the 19th and 20th century. However, I assert that photography best represents that the indigenous subject was redefined as a monadic individual even if his/her outward practices and appearance might have otherwise represented him/her as traditional.