This article examines Arab photography in Ottoman and Mandate Lebanon. It begins to explain how the photographic image naturalized the discourses of individualism, class identity, and nationalism that were germinated in the political economy and the organic intellectual culture of the late Ottoman Empire. Inspired less by Orientalist imagery or mimicry of the West than by specific ideological planks of capitalism and modernity, images produced by professionals Sabunji and the Kovas and such amateurs as Salim Abu Izz al-din and Marie Khazen instituted a new process of desiring capitalist production, accumulation, and commodity consumption in Lebanon. Photography reified the imago (the discursive imagined self) of the Lebanese bourgeois as a composite of private and public and sectarian and secular identities—but first and foremost as an individual. However, theWestern narrative that associates photography with the secularism of the bourgeois self finds its limits in the sectarian political economy and power sharing of Lebanon.