This paper will discuss aspects of urban youth culture and youth subjectivity in 1940s Egypt. I will look at private photographs and diaries created by young men and women, and examine them as both visual narratives and material artefacts embedded in specific social contexts and relationships. These private albums and diaries were meant to remain hidden from social seniors; at most, they circulated in controlled contexts in small homosocial peer groups. They have strong class and generational aspects. In some ways the individualized practices of young middle-class Egyptians in mid-20th century Egypt bring to mind social media of the early 2000’s. This paper will look at such artefacts as spaces where nascent individualist subjectivities (among other distinctly modern forms of perceiving the self) were performed and cultivated without threatening the patriarchal social order as such. They illustrate how, in social practice, patriarchy and individualism construct each other. Secondly, the strongly generational aspect of such youth practices will be discussed within the context of the emergence of a specific peer identity—a distinctly modern youth culture heavily exploited by the media but by no means limited to it—that was often defined against the senior generation. This generational conflict that was slowly emerging through the Interwar period had crucial political dimensions and consequences.