There is a rich and growing body of literature on the relationship between photography in the 19th and early 20th centuries and modernity, Orientalism, and European colonialism in the Middle East (Alloula 1986, Ozendes 1987, Graham-Brown 1988, Perez 1998, Erdo?du 1999, Woodward 2003, Behdad and Gartlan 2013, Çelik and Eldem 2015, Behdad 2016, Sheehi 2016). Much of this scholarship has noted Europe’s photographic obsession with the “Oriental” woman and has convincingly demonstrated that the portrayal of women as exotic, timeless, passive, and oppressed beings in need of saving was used as one of the moral justifications for European colonial ambitions in the region. An aspect of photography that remains almost entirely unexplored, however, is the representation of “Oriental” non-normative bodies: impaired, disfigured, deformed, grotesque, odd. This paper hopes to contribute to redressing the balance by examining representations of Ottoman disabled bodies produced mostly in the region that corresponds to today’s Lebanon, Syria, Palestine, Jordan, and Turkey in the late 19th century. I examine not only European photographers like the Italian-French Tancrède Dumas (1830-1905) and the French French Félix Bonfils (1831-1885), but also some local photographers, including those featured in the 1893 Sultan Abdul Hamid II Collection. Theoretically, I adopt a Disability Studies approach informed by the groundbreaking work on photography and disability by Rosemarie Garland Thomson (2001) and Robert Bogdan (2012). Prominent Disability Studies theorist Rosemary Garland-Thomson in particular famously proposed a taxonomy of four primary visual rhetorics of disability in photography: wondrous, sentimental, exotic, and realistic. The core argument I make is that much like the images of women, representations of disability, too, were used as metaphors for the abject state of the Ottoman Empire and served to reinforce the notion of the Orient as the “Other.” Thus, disability was inextricably intertwined with the European colonial project. But, importantly, as the Sultan Abdul Hamid II Collection demonstrates, depictions of disability were also inextricably linked with Ottoman modernization efforts.