In “Ottomans and the Kodak Galaxy: Archiving Everyday Life and Historical Space in Ottoman Illustrated Journals,” art historian Ahmet Ersoy identifies a telling instance when a late nineteenth century Ottoman journalist/writer by the name of Ahmet Rasim (1864-1932) holds in his hands a printed copy of his own portrait photograph for the first time. Bewildered at the encounter with his past self preserved on paper in photographic form, he writes, “[I now realize] the retrieval of the past is a true source of consolation for a human being.” Building on this example, this paper investigates the new ways of remembering, registering and projecting the self among the Ottoman people of letters, following the ‘photomechanical revolution’ that enabled the instant and accurate registry of selected moments of life. To this end, I trace the effects of a photographic imagery in a series of memoirs written by Ahmet Rasim’s contemporaries (including, Ahmet ?hsan, Hüseyin Cahit, and Halit Ziya), a representative mode that claims to emulate the outside world with unmediated photochemical precision, and see how memoirs work as devices of preserving/commemorating the past, as well as envisioning future selves.