In recent times, both among scholars and museum professionals, an increasing amount of attention has been paid to the long-neglected, but truly vast corpus of photographs existing in museums outside formal museum collections. These are usually understood and used in museums as mere tools with different functions within the institutional ‘ecosystem’, as items which are ‘just there’. In the environment of Croatian institutions, the tendencies that cast light on the ‘non-collection photographs’ have manifested in two fields of academic and professional interest. More specifically, it has turned out that, in addition to lesser-known private collections, it is precisely this mass of orphaned photographs in museums that is often a bountiful supplement for the national photographic canon. On the other hand, these photographs are increasingly becoming a subject of interest in the context of perceiving the ‘epistemological potential’5 of photographic collections/non-collections/archives within the framework of scholarly disciplines relied on by individual museums. Via the same mechanism, they contribute to the reconstruction of the history of museums and prevailing institutional discourses and practices. I will reflect on a specific segment of museum photography, which is, so to speak, lowlier than ‘lowly’ in a museum.