In the Introduction: Photographs as Objects to their Photographs Objects Histories: On the Materiality of Images Elizabeth Edwards and Janice Hart draw a useful distinction between photographs as image and as material object.

This distinction is not often made in our image-based culture and it indicates that a photograph can be seen as a more complex object than simply an image.

Edwards and Hart say that:

The central rationale of Photographs Objects Histories is that a photograph is a three- dimensional thing, not only a two-dimensional image. As such, photographs exist materially in the world, as chemical deposits on paper, as images mounted on a multitude of different sized, shaped, coloured and decorated cards, as subject to additions to their surface or as drawing their meanings from presentational forms such as frames and albums. Photographs are both images and physical objects that exist in time and space and thus in social and cultural experience. They have ‘volume, opacity, tactility and a physical presence in the world’ .... and are thus enmeshed with subjective, embodied and sensuous interactions. These characteristics cannot be reduced to an abstract status as a commodity, nor to a set of meanings or ideologies that take the image as their pretext. Instead, they occupy spaces, move into different spaces, following lines of passage and usage that project them through the world....

This indicates that a photograph is a multilayered laminated object in which meaning is derived from a symbiotic relationship between materiality of the object, the content or image, and context or the discursive system in which the image is embedded.