I'm going crazy staring at this. I need to change the attribute of an element, something which I have done many times before. But it fails. Now I can't even get jquery to show me the attribute that it has. Does it have to do with what is returned by find()? var c = new_photo_div.find('[class = photo]')[0]; alert(c); alert(new_photo_div.attr('class')); alert(c.attr('class')); The first alert correctly identifies the element: Object HTMLImageElement The second alert correctly gives me the class of new_photo_div. The third alert fails. No alert. I think it should say: photo