The photographs that have been captured during World War I in eastern Anatolia and the Mesopotamian region regarding the deportation and extermination of the Ottoman Armenians were limited in number, due to the harsh climate and health conditions in the war zones, the low number of neutral and Entente State representatives in the region as well as the prohibition of photography in deportation zones. Nevertheless, through the alliance of the Ottoman Empire and Germany that enabled a great diplomatic network spread all over the empire, a number of German diplomats, missionaries and volunteers, who got individually involved in the effort to change the flow of events, were able to capture images. However, the reproduction and remediation of these limited photographs that appear nowadays as part of the visual representation of the Armenian genocide conform to a format of genocidal imagery derived from the excessive image production and circulation of the Holocaust, which very much shaped the way atrocities are apprehended. As Holocaust imaginary has determined the perception of how to comprehend violence and suffering, the Armenian genocide, which predates the Holocaust, has been demarcated and configured in relation to the representation of the Holocaust. In this regard, this paper will look at photographs of the Armenian genocide not solely as historiographical tools (either standing in as evidence for the truth of the event, or representing the totality of it), but will seek to think along photography’s affective power and persuasive capacity. By focusing on the particular case of the German consulate in Erzurum in 1915, which is comprised of numerous documents and few photographs of early stages of deportation, this paper will not only demonstrate the volatile mechanisms of military intelligence through the diplomatic correspondences but will challenge the paradigm intrinsic to the study of genocide photography. As these photographs were neither integrated into the historiography of the representation of the Armenian genocide, nor into the historiography of personal initiatives taken by some German individuals, this paper will argue that the lack of violence in these photographs prevented them to conform to the genocidal imagery. Nevertheless, through “complex set of relations”, it will demonstrate that despite the comparatively few images that were captured, the study of photography, through its evidential and testimonial capacity, proposes a distinctive comprehension of the experience of the Catastrophe.