In 1873, the volume Les Costumes Populaires de la Turquie en 1873 (Elbise-i Osmaniyye in Ottoman) was published to accompany the Ottoman Empire's installations at the Vienna World Exposition of that year. Seventy-four photographs by the Istanbul-based photographer Pascal Sébah portrayed Ottoman “types” wearing distinctive regional dress from across the empire. Eminent Ottoman cultural figure Osman Hamdi Bey and his French colleague and fellow Istanbul resident Victor Marie de Launay penned a series of French explanatory texts for the book. Costumes Populaires has been viewed by scholars as an affirmative exercise in articulating Ottoman identity through the adoption and manipulation of a fundamentally European mode of knowledge, the ethnographic survey of anonymous ethnic “types.” But in the accompanying text, the volume's authors develop a subtle discourse that previous studies have largely ignored, a discourse which in fact betrays the logic of ethnographic typology. I argue that Costumes Populaires establishes a structure of difference which functions at the level of the individual subject. The volume's authors argue that individuals' capacity to both articulate and fulfill their own distinct role in life is an essentially moral issue, and that costume retains both an illustrative and actively productive role in this process. Ottoman citizens are thus fit into a hierarchical scale based upon their ability to exercise individual will. This role carries particular implications for their status as photographic subjects: neither fully severed from ideals of agency and self-realization, nor wholly realized as full, independent subjects, Costumes Populaires' Ottoman citizens occupy an ambiguous, intermediate position between that of anonymous ethnographic “types” and individualized portraits. The photographic portrait is a hallmark of the development of the bourgeois subject in the 19th century. By constructing their vision of the Ottoman empire around an accumulation of newly individualized photographic subjects, the authors of Costumes Populaires exceeded the very structuring ideals of the ethnographic model they took on: in lieu of a passive collection of bodies mobilized for an Ottoman promotional cause, Costumes Populaires represents an eminently contemporary Ottoman political body unified in the rational pursuit of self-realization.