Photographs straddle the boundary between an everyday technology, a medium, a commodity form, and a cultural practice. This paper will focus on the ways in which photographs were understood, and how photography was practiced and used by a broad spectrum of middling social groups in Egypt between the late 19th century and through the first half of the 20th. My sources include tens of thousands of photographs housed in private collections in Egypt, textual sources and oral history interviews. My overall preoccupation is what does paying attention to photographs not just as underused sources but rather as historiographical drivers has to offer to histories of modernity in the region and beyond. As most technologies, photographs did what those who wielded them wanted them to do, realising a set of often deeply modern preoccupations and desires. The main argument of my paper is that photography represented one of the key rituals of modernity. To demonstrate this, I will focus on a set of practices that evolved around personal photographs and their specific social effects. These include: 1) the affinities between photographs and novel writing practices which worked to crystalise modern forms of selfhood by mediating the relationship between an observing (and writing) self and the world, newly understood as a set of objective phenomena ready to be examined, observed, and analysed; 2) how the intense exchange of photographs as tokens of affection (dependent on the concomitant expansion of the postal service and novel practices of letter writing) worked to cement social ties among relatives thus crystalizing what we know today as the ‘Arab family’; 3) and how photographic practices and rituals helped to normalize a distinctly modern sense of time as linear, chronological, and progressive. Photographs have a strong ontological relationship to time, however, and I will conclude by arguing that paying closer attention to the temporalities caught in, and realised by, everyday personal photography tells us a great deal about the nature of time under capitalist modernity. The vast corpus of Egyptian personal photographs clearly shows that the regimented and ordered linear temporality of modernity could only work by simultaneously creating, or allowing, discrete pockets of liminal, meandering time. Such temporal pockets of unstructured freedom produced an illusion of agency which allowed temporal and other forms of discipline and power to thrive, an illusion of agency on which the logic of capitalism is based.