Scholars have recently reexamined the history of the photography of Iran since the late 1970s thanks to the enormous efforts of the curator of the Golestan Palace’s, Badri Atabay and the indexification of the archival photographs. Since then, a variety of topics dealing with content within the frames of the photographs has been published. However, scholars have attempted less to read the outside of the frames and the context in which the early Iranian photographs were captured and circulated. This paper examines the Naseri period (1848-1896) during which time the palace extensively employed photography during a time that commercial photographers were also motivated to take pictures for their interests. I claim that the Shah wanted to import modern technology, which included photography as well, into Iran to modernize absolutist rule. However, what I conclude is that the commercial interests and private businesses benefitted disproportionately from the introduction of such technologies in comparison to the royal court beginning by the 1870s. More specifically, commercial photographers became superior at using photography to present images of an autonomous Iranian society than was the court. This was potentially destabilizing for the regime, since it was both "objectively" threatened by rebellions and also recognized that it needed to visually present itself in a compelling way to maintain its power in this new age of photography and Western tools of modernity more broadly. In this study, I take this clash and context into account to assess these photographs from the Golestan archive properly that serves for the development of photography in Iran. More specifically, I draw on novel archival research in the photographs of the Golestan Palace Archive to explore how the palace started to exercise the Daguerreotype to propagate the traditional ruling power with the aim of engendering fear and creating splendor among the subjects. Scholars tend to analyze the photographs of the period as the representation of the majestic image of the dynasty. However, this study moves debates further by employing the messages and the functions of the photographs through examination of the needs of the palace. I argue that most of the photographs of the Naseri period captured after the 1870s were the visible version of the palace's tactics in order to stand against the flow advancing from commercial photographers in visualizing the rebellions against the state.