In this talk, I wish to argue that Orientalism, if understood not merely as an ideological discourse of power or as an art historical term but as a network of aesthetic, economic, and political relationships that crosses national and historical boundaries, is paramount to the understanding of nineteenth century photography. Whether studied in the context of their production and dissemination in the nineteenth century or in relation to their current afterlives as collectable objects or archives, photographs of the Middle East become meaningful and legible if they are considered in term of the geo-political distinctions and cultural assumptions of Orietalism. In claiming that Orientalism does matter to the understanding of photographic representations of the Middle East, I do not mean that such images are merely expressive of Europeans’ racial prejudice against "Orientals," or that these images simply validate Euro-imperial dominance over the region. Nor, do I wish to suggest that orientalist photography entails a binary visual structure between the Europeans as active agents and “Orientals” as passive objects of representation. Rather, I hope to offer an alternate view of orientalist photography, which focuses on nodes and ties that bind artists, collectors, and museums across historical and national boundaries which are productive of a distinctly exotic vision of the region, a vision at once embraced and perpetuated by the elite in the Middle East. Such a network theory of Orientalism concerns itself neither with the motivations of individual artists nor with the attributes of art objects, but instead studies the symmetric and asymmetric relations between discrete objects, specific individuals, and concrete practices. I will elaborate my argument by focusing on Ken and Jenny Jacobson orientalist photography collection and Pierre de Gigord collection of photographs of the Ottoman Empire and the Republic of Turkey held at the Getty Research Institute.