The Kemalist revolution privileged the construction of an “ideal woman” for the Republic over that of an “ideal man.” Although the 1926 Civil Code regulated the lives of both men and women, discussions concerning issues such as equal rights to inheritance, testimony, legal marriage, and the ban on polygamy primarily revolved around their effect on women. Yet the role and appearance of men also had to be redefined in the context of a Turkish society that sought to portray itself as modern and “civilized.” Mustafa Kemal Atatürk, who carefully constructed and communicated his image as a modern charismatic leader domestically and internationally, came to represent and embody the new nation and the “new man” that the republic aimed to create. As the Kemalists worked hard to define and disseminate their idea of what the new Turkish woman should look and live like, how was the image of the new Turkish man conceived and circulated? What were the components of the new Republican masculinity, as compared with Ottoman masculinity? Focusing on a turbulent era marked by social disruption and political crisis, this paper will investigate visual representations of men in vernacular photography in an attempt to dissect the characteristics of the ideal “Republican Man.” I will examine the roots of the image of the ideal Turkish man in the making of the modern Ottoman man as represented in literature and the press from the mid-nineteenth century onwards. Compared to the large number of scholarly works in Women’s Studies, scholarship in Men’s Studies in Turkey, particularly scholarship focusing on the molding of the modern Turkish man in the early Republican era, is relatively scarce, this paper aims to contribute to the scholarship on representations of Turkish masculinities in general, and in the early Republican era more specifically. Identifying a set of genres that played a pivotal role in the construction of these modern Turkish masculinities, such as military and family portraits, I will look at how urban middle-class men used photography to perform their desired selves as modern citizens, modern fathers and modern husbands in the 1920s and 1930s, collectively shaping the ideal image of the Turkish man as a loyal supporter of the Kemalist regime. Accordingly, this paper will study what the making of this new modern masculinity meant for the establishment of the Republic as a critical component of its nation-building process.