In front of the lens, I am at the same time: the one I think I am, the one I want others to think I am. (roland Barthes) In his essay on the constitutive role of photography in the construction of collective identities in nineteenth-century romania, the photohistorian adrian-silvan Ionescu identifies a genre of photographic portraits as representations of “Bulgarian national heroes.” 1 unfortunately, Ionescu leaves open the question of what exactly he means by this term, and he does not give a visual example of this photographic genre. Indeed, a large number of portrait photographs of ottoman Bulgarians posed in a “heroic” manner exist, all made in the second half of the nineteenth century in romanian photography studios. Many of them are today an integral part of the Bul- garian historical tradition, and they have become deeply imprinted onto the visual memories of generations as a testimony to and documentation of the Bulgarian national movement against ottoman rule (ca. 1396–1878). not a single history book has failed to reproduce them, and they hang in every school and public building. even the uniforms of the national guard today are influenced by this photographic genre, which Ionescu would later accurately sum up as the “Bulgarian national hero.” It is obvious that Ionescu did not derive the term from this particular “heroic” pictorial tradition but from another kind of photographic genre: “oriental-type” photography. More exactly, Ionescu has very likely borrowed it from the title of a photograph taken by the famous Viennese photographer Ludwig angerer (1827–1879) during the Crimean War (1853–1856), probably in Bucharest (fig. 1). 2 designating a male portrait with the title “ a Bulgarian national hero? or a Turkish Bimbashi?” is both ambiguous and literally questionable. It seems that while creating his term, Ionescu did not know that the two ethnic attributions “Bulgarian” and “Turkish” could not be more disparate from a contemporary perspective. The essentialist historical narrative of the ottoman era portrays the “Turk” as the ultimate enemy of the “Bul- garian” and the “Bulgarian national hero” as fighting against 500 years of oppression by the “Turkish Bimbashi.” 3 seen from today’ s national perspective, the interchange- MarTIna BaLeVa The heroIC Lens: PorTraIT PhoTograPhy of oTToMan InsurgenTs In The nIneTeenTh-CenTury BaLKans—TyPes and uses