Between 1880 and 1893, Sultan Abdülhamid II commissioned an extensive photographic project that produced approximately 33,000 photographs organized into over 900 albums, from which 1,819 images were selected, classified into five administrative categories, and dispatched as diplomatic gifts to the Library of Congress and the British Museum. This article argues that these Gift Albums constituted not a photographic collection but a proto-infrastructural image system, a state-controlled visual database in which photographs functioned as instruments of imperial legibility and taxonomic control. The Albums' five-category structure enacted what this article terms categorical violence: harm that operates not through individual images but through the classificatory system that determines which populations, spaces, and practices deserve visibility and which are consigned to systematic invisibility. Simultaneously, a parallel photographic apparatus including criminal identification albums, prison photography orders, and population registers deployed the same infrastructure for inward-facing surveillance and administrative control. Drawing on Bowker and Star's classification theory, Sekula's analysis of photographic archives, Scott's framework of state legibility, and critical scholarship on algorithmic governance, this article traces the institutional genealogy from these twin Ottoman visual apparatuses through the Republican identity document's universalisation of photographic identification (1926–1934), MERNİS's digitisation of 122 million population records (1997–2002), and the deployment of AI-powered facial recognition within the KGYS urban surveillance system (2005–2025). The argument is genealogical, not analogical: the classificatory categories of contemporary Turkish digital governance descend from Ottoman administrative structures through documented institutional transmission across regime changes. This genealogy intervenes in surveillance studies' predominantly Western periodisation by Bentham, Foucault, through digital panopticon by demonstrating that the categorical violence of algorithmic systems is not a technological novelty, but an intensification of visual-administrative logics independently developed within a non-Western imperial context. The algorithm is the latest medium. The categorical violence is the structure.

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