In recent years, historians of photography have shown that, rather than being simply a product of modernization, photographic practices helped drive shifts in a range of practices foundational to the experience of modernity. Additionally, by emphasizing photography’s function as both a means of representation and as social practice, these scholars have broadened our perspective on how photographs can and ought to be studied. More recently, photography theorist Ariella Azoulay has called for greater attention to photography not only as a social practice but as a political space, a site of encounter between the individuals present in the moment of the photograph’s creation and all those who might see and use the photograph after the shutter’s click. This paper heeds Azoulay’s call by using photography to explore how education served as a site of exchange and competition between social groups active in the Ottoman territories in the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries. I take as my primary objects of analysis two photographic archives: the photographic albums produced at the behest of the Sultan Abdulhamid II and gifted to the U.S. Library of Congress in 1894, and the photographic archive of Robert College, an educational institution founded in Istanbul in 1863 by American missionaries. Each of these groups of images aimed to represent new educational practices and institutions intended to transform the Ottoman citizenry. The Ottoman bureaucrats and American missionary educators in charge of these projects understood them as the very embodiment of modernity. The photographic archives these groups left behind provide insight into their competing understandings of that concept, as well as traces of the processes of negotiation and exchange that occurred between them. By framing this history as one of competition and dialogue between Ottoman educational reformers and educators from other countries, this paper endeavors to contribute to recent efforts by historians of the late Ottoman period, such as Benjamin Fortna, Selim Deringil and Wendy Shaw, who have worked to provide an understanding of Ottoman agency to the historical record. By reading these photographic images as documents of an encounter between three groups—Ottoman educational reformers, American missionary educators, and the students who filled their classrooms—this paper provides insight into a pivotal moment of negotiation and exchange, whose end product was not merely the production of modern Ottoman subjects, but the institutions and discourse of modernity itself.