In keeping with the theme for the 2010 meeting, my paper will examine gender and sexual roles in family albums from the late Ottoman and British Mandate Jerusalem. It will investigate both the albums as sources for the study of social life in the city at the time, as well as the agency of the albums as objects with social life of their own. While the former goal is self explanatory, the latter appears paradoxical in light of the common wisdom in which agents and objects are dichotomously contrasted. Drawing on recent research in fields like archeology, history and representation relating to material culture, my paper will counter such an assumption about the dichotomy between people and things as it argues that inanimate objects come to be "socially alive" in certain historical contexts. More specifically, the paper will examine a number of albums preserved in family collections of Palestinians who lived in Jerusalem during the period in question. They include the photographic albums of musician Wasif Jawhariyeh, of Julia and George Lucy, and of the Salti, Sahhar, and Theodory families, among others. Although the bulk of the photographs in the albums represent family life as depicted in personal portraits, quite a few of the pictures in the albums deal with travel, picnics, social activities, family occasions and political events. One album in particular depicts the trip taken by five young Palestinians from Jerusalem in 1936 to attend the Olympics in Berlin. The seven albums of Jawhariyeh depict public figures and political events from the period. Photographic albums are archives of memory and visual records of family and personal lives. As they are viewed, and shown, by various people, the process begins whereby they read into them not only--or maybe not at all--what the owner of the album intended, but what they can or chose to see through the coloring of their own knowledge, expectations, background and ideological orientation. Thus, with each "viewing" a new set of meanings is assigned to the album and the pictures it contains. Examining the ways in which such albums were transmitted, sold on eBay or by antiquarians, preserved in archives--familial or national--and viewed by later generations can also inform us of how these albums, and the family structures, and gender roles they depict came to be seen by intervening generations.