This paper focuses on the official and alternative histories of Turkish modernity performed in vernacular photographs with an emphasis on the interplay between photography and gender. I investigate the modern femininities and masculinities that Turkish citizens produced and negotiated during the formative years of the Republic by studying representations of urban middle-class and upper middle-class women and men. Through a series of studio portraits and snapshots from the 1920s and the 1930s, the paper explores ways in which photography was used as a tool to generate shared memories, and the role visual self-representations played in forming social identities for the newly minted citizens of a modern nation state in the context of a society undergoing rapid secularization and Westernization. By decrypting visual and textual information in the photographic material, I analyze its social, economic, cultural, and geographical origins and the relationships present therein. Research material is sourced from a collection of 17,000 vernacular photographs from Turkey, which I have built over the years for the Akkasah Photography Archive at the New York University Abu Dhabi. By exploring the gender roles that urban middle and upper middle-class women and men adopted and performed in and outside the studio setting, I explore to what degree such performances accord with the modernizing reforms and discourses of the Kemalist era.