This paper will discuss what initially appears as the "afterlife" of 19th-century Orientalist visual conventions in local Egyptian vernacular photography. Throughout the 20th century, Egyptian women enjoyed getting photographed by commercial studios wearing a variety of costumes, posing as "bedouins," "peasants," "Arab sheikhs" or harem ladies clad in robes of vaguely oriental nature. While typically such photographs were produced by inexpensive local studios, similar practices of visualising the self can often be found in snapshots taken with home-owned Kodaks and arranged into private albums. Naturally, such images were not just intended for local consumption, but quite particularly for a private one. Framed on walls, they ended up decorating domestic interiors, exchanged with friends, or arranged in family and personal albums. This paper will unpack this peculiar practice. I will argue that these images ought to be read in their local historical and social contexts, in which issues of class, gender, and cultural identity played key roles. First and foremost, such portraits were commissioned or produced by middle-class urban Egyptians who felt safely removed from their "traditional" pasts. Read against other cultural texts, such imagery fits into the concomitant production of local authenticity evident in films and fiction of the period, by means of which an indigenous Egyptian modernity was asserted and cultivated. Read historically, I will argue that every generation packed this visual convention with new meanings. Early-20th century Egyptian ladies dressed as "odalisques" were emulating the western tourist, through a practice that they thought was making them fashionable and draw them closer to their western idols of femininity. Middle-class women of the Interwar period dressed as "bedouins" or "peasants," authenticating their bourgeois femininity through a highly mediated reference to a local pastoral femininity. (Significantly, they also took pictures in trousers, and then juxtaposed images "as (female) peasants" and "as men" in their private albums). In the 1950s, educated urban girls liked to pose for the camera as "bint al-balad"—a powerful symbol of traditional urban femininity expressed through a net-like facial veil—in an ethos of national pride that blended powerful political and social themes of a post-independent era with the seemingly private realm of fashion and female portraiture. Rather than enacting an "oriental" identity in any possible sense of the word, those women were making historically constructed performative statements about local authenticity that was inseparable from their self-professed modernity as well as instrumental to its articulation.