During the period from 1900 to 1950, the production and deployment of photographic images of the Egyptian child by Egyptian adults played a role in nationalism, a role as yet unstudied by historians of Egypt or of photography. The studio portrait selected here represents the commonly produced genre of photographs that showed Egyptian children as technologically capable and possessing Western symbols of progress. This picture of two girls and one boy surrounding an adult man's bike—whose wheels are larger than the smallest child and on whose seat seems to be placed the decorative vase of flowers in the backdrop—suggests that the children are present in the living room not to ride the bike but rather to show off their possession of a modern means of transportation (and perhaps to learn about it from the books resting on the bike's rear rack).