If modernity has a universal history and a general applicability, then this universality has always been within the domain of the cultural West (Hall: 1996). Thus, when the emergence of the modern is encountered in a non-Western locale, its effect is profoundly disturbing. It mirrors and amplifies the alienation and loss originally experienced in the modernization of the Western self. This was often the conundrum for nineteenth-century travelers to the Ottoman Empire who witnessed disorienting modernization throughout its territories even when their visit was predicated on the singular objective of finding and recovering the pre-modern. Nineteenth-century print media from the Ottoman Empire, specifically Istanbul, visually highlights this tension. In this paper, I undertake an intertextual reading of two such distinct yet related collections of visuals: the photographic postcards of Max Fruchtermann and the Sultan Abdül Hamid II albums gifted to the United States and the United Kingdom in the 1890s. Indeed, many of the photographic templates of Fruchtermann’s postcards are also found within Sultan Abdül Hamid II’s albums underscoring the multiplicity of interpretations and narratives associated with these images in varied contexts. Here, I examine the treatment of landscapes, historical monuments, and industrial and military facilities across the two collections to see how the former crafts historicized views that neatly confine the modernizing capital in the past and how the latter pushes for parity with the self-proclaimed modern polities of Europe and America. In both instances modernity remains a contested condition.