Jewish nation-building during the Mandate was a Jewish affair so it seems. Yet the way it was presented abroad was shaped by onlookers on the ground. The American Colony, with its massive production of photographs of events and transformations in Mandate Palestine, did not only observe Jewish nation-building on the ground. It also actively influenced the way it was perceived globally. This paper approaches the microhistory of Christian-American photographic production from an imperial angle to ask how local and visiting photographers exchanged views and viewpoints in creating a visual language of multi-national belonging. By means of following the colony’s photographers as documenters and public figures to dances of the “Y”, outings to Jordan or photographer’s union meetings in Tel Aviv, it explores the department as a cell of international dynamics and artistic debates on statehood in Mandate Palestine. At the same time, it asks for the imperial networks the colony was part of and that directed its gaze and how they influenced both the self-perception of the Colony’s members and their photographic approaches and professional connections. The paper demonstrates that expanding our gaze both towards additional actors on the ground and geographically, by adding the imperial angle to local transformations, helps to uncover previously ignored or unacknowledged entangled histories of nation-building and empire, in Mandate Palestine. The main argument will be that the state that was envisioned during the Mandate years was a result of factors that reach beyond the immediate ideological foundations formulated by the Jewish pioneers of the early immigration waves.