EVERY force that we encounter, besides gravity, is a result of the electromagnetic force. That is if you don't routinely work around radioactive materials, fusion, or a particle accelerator.
Friction is the result of the electric fields of electrons in atoms interacting with each other. The stickiest substances known have very strong interactions with most matter.
A photon is essentially a standing wave of an electromagnetic field. From the photon's point of view, there is no universe. The photon sees no change in time: the photon travels at the speed of light, so that means that all of the energy in the photon goes into distorting space and not time. That small distortion of space is evident by the photon's electromagnetic field (which I'll get to in a moment), but it also means that the photon will interact with matter via the gravitational force.
The photons are the messengers of events between electrons, and the occasional photon or neutron. They are a wave that we see as traveling from point A to point B, but they transfer energy from one charged particle to another. A single photon can also be thought of as an entity that breaks off from one electron; causing the electron to go to a lower energy state, and the photon to race away (from our point of view!). That photon will encounter another electron or possibly a proton or neutron, and that little bit of warped space/packet of charge joins the newly encountered particle to let it know of the existence of the electron that spawned it.
Now back to the no time change for the photon...
This can be argued from a couple of different points. The first being that of relativity and Lorentz Transforms: that the energy occupies space, time, or a combination of both, and since the energy is traveling AT the maximum speed allowed, but the energy moves through space, then there is no left over energy to "push into" the time dimension. The second argument is purely mathematical: the mathematical description of a photon invovles what are called null geodesic. These are special structures (think geode), that have zero SPACE-TIME distance, which means that something traveling on a null geodesic, through spacetime, will see an instantaneous transport from one point to the next. Though you could not tell the difference if you moved because movements are done in steps and each step looks like the previous one, kind of like moving across the "waves" on a piece of infinitely wide corrugated metal sheet. The universe from a photon's point of view is a null geodesic.
The third argument comes from reasoning about the second law of thermodynamics (entropy). Without a zero time change for the photon, the wave packet that makes up the photon's energy would have a chance to relax to a lower state. Just like anything else that's pent up, as soon as the walls are removed, the thing spreads out. You would actually see energy dissipating as it travels. This is NOT related to the spread of a wave as the wave travels from it's point of origin. This would be like letting a single bit, "1", decay to the lower ground state bit, "0".
The fourth argument is a but more complicated than I could put here.
Now, on to your main concern...
Just because something doesn't have mass does not mean that it can't be manipulated. Ever think about how space is warped by a black hole? Space itself has no mass, yet it is distorted by the huge mass of a black hole. There is a related effect of mass called frame dragging. Frame dragging is what happens to spacetime around a mass that is spinning. It's been detected around the earth, and the earth is not very massive in the grand scheme of things. What happens is that the spinning mass winds up spacetime around itself. Since the earth is not very massive, spacetime is allowed to "slip" ever so slightly around the earth which is thought to cause gravity waves and a possible wobble. The problem is that gravity waves are EXTREMELY long in wavelength and are hard to detect unless you have a large detector. So gravity waves are unproven, but frame dragging is.
Now that you know that, consider that the photon almost entirely interacts with electrons in atoms. If you are slowing the photon down, you are technically slowing down the wave packet of the photon. This is done by coordinating all of the electric and magnetic fields of the atoms and electrons so that little peaks and valleys are formed in the electromagnetic field. These valleys can trap the photon.
Alternatively, you can direct the path of a photon so that it bounces between electrons in a lattice of atoms. Though technically each time a photon interacts with an electron, the photon disappears, since the electromagnetic fields of the two converge to bring the electron to a higher state where. As the electron "cools down" it gives off a photon, and it just so happens that the new photon is just like the old one.
There have been experiments where the electric field of a photon was measured. And with electronics, this measurement happens anytime someone takes a photo. The chemicals in the film, or the CCD array in a digital camera react to the photons that they encounter. Both have electrons that are excited by an incoming photon, though both also have electron configurations that tend to force the electron to transfer its energy to another electron and so on until the chemical reaction is complete or the signal is sent off of the CCD. There are even new cameras that use quantum wells to trap incoming photons.
I've seen experiments where single photons were detected by sensitive CCDs, and the human eye is just sensitive enough to detect single photons in very special conditions. Photons can affect an electric field as they pass next to one as well. This happens in mode-locked lasers that are coupled with a dielectric material. There are other ways that photons can affect an electric field that I can't discuss because it gets into my work.
One thing that I forgot to mention was that if you could somehow take the photon's energy packet and "stretch" it out, so that the wavelength increases without losing energy, you could essentially slow the photon way down. I think this could be done by putting the photon into a cloud of supercooled gas, where the gas is a Bose-Einstein condensate, which is a fancy name for a material that can be thought of as a superatom because all of the atoms act in unison with each other in a form of "mode locking" that happens when each atom has the exact same quantum identifiers. That means that one atom has the exact same energy/spin/electron configuration/magnetic moment/etc as the next atom. in those kinds of materials the whole material would respond the way a single atom would when a photon hit it.