As the story goes, the famous Ottoman-Armenian photographers Abdullah Frères impressed Sultan ‘Abd al-‘Aziz with their skill by producing a flattering portrait after the Potentate’s first experience with a European photographer ended miserably. At the same time, Disdéri’s carte de visite portrait of Napoleon started “cartomania," the world’s first global phenomenon in visual culture. Istanbul studios Abdullah Frères, Vassilki Kargopoulo, and Sébah were followed by native owned studios in the Arab provincial capitals, most notably, but certainly not limited to, Jurji Sabunji and Kova Frères in Beirut and, eventually, Garabed Krikorian in Jerusalem. Like photography itself, studio portraiture was rapidly acculturated into cultural and political life of the Empire, seamlessly interpellated by the ideology of al-Nahda al-‘Arabiyya and the Tanzimat, the two intertwined juggernauts that naturalized the tectonic social, political, and economic changes underway as a result of the region’s immersion into the world economy. This paper discusses how the photographic studio portrait did not only perform the national, class, and gender ideals of new “social groups” in Ottoman Egypt, Palestine, and Syria. Rather, the multivalent role and effects of the portrait as a materialist object that circulated within new social networks was also, in Lacan’s words, a “screen-image” that acted as an after-image of changes in political economy that were already underway. On a materialist level, the portrait mediated and stabilized social relations between Ottoman functionaries, emerging elites, organic intellectuals, and burgeoning citizens through new circuits of political and economic sociability. Dialoguing with Peter Gran’s work in Rise of the Rich, John Willis’s “interactive emergence” of new social groups, and Bruno Latour’s social network theory, this presentation examines how the carte de visite shored up shifting horizontal and vertical relations within the Ottoman Arab provinces. However, we also discover that these material and social relations could transpire only because these new social groups shared an ideological framework, that of the Nahda and Tanzimat, that could be expressed visually as well as through social, political, and economic practices. Therefore, as a copula where the juridical subject meets the new nationalized, class, and gendered subject of biopower, the carte de visite could mediate the anxieties of shifting class-inflected ideologies and discourses of social reform, economic reorganization, and political governance. In effect, this paper will show that the portrait was a stabilizing materialist object and semiotic text that instantiated the ideology of the era against a torrent of social and economic change.