Photographs and prints are often seen out of any meaningful context. Many early printed maps and botanical or natural history plates, for example, were published within large atlases, books, or magazines. Today they are often framed up and hanging on walls as decorations.

If you go to a photography show, photographs are stacked up or displayed in large bins. Daguerreotypes or other cased images are arranged in neat, regular geometric arrays, one after the other. Photograph collections, both public and private, are boxed up in mylar or archival paper sleeves and safely kept from the light.

But how did people live with their photographs when these objects were first created? They displayed them as objects. The parlor Bible opened on a stand to show portraits family members. A locket containing a small jewel-like daguerreotype portrait. An ambrotype kept on a desk. Cabinet cards lined up across a mantel.

We of course do this too, even if this display is the iPhone in our pocket, a shared Pinterest or Tumblr board online, or a poignant slide show at a memorial service. We sometimes forget the suchness of photographic images.

Some photographic collectors make a point of collecting photographs that show photographs in context. Such images include portraits of living people holding photographs of departed loved ones, documentary photographs of house interiors showing a stereo photograph viewer, or those cabinet cards lined up on the mantel or sideboard.

Above we see the portrait of Roland Hayes, an internationally celebrated African-American lyric tenor from the 1920s to the 1960s. The 1927 photograph is not in some well-thumbed bin or neatly matted up, but is in a contemporary gilt frame.

This frame is a decorative object and, to its recipient – in this case Hayes’ manager William H. Brennan – a token of gratitude and a present reminder of friendship.

Here we can better glimpse its context in time (note the Art Deco influenced frame) and its function as a useful object.