I begin with an introduction to our activities related to biophotonics, which encompass optical imaging in scattering media such as tissue and statistical optics. This summary will highlight our recent demonstration of a method to image fluorescence resonance energy transfer (FRET) parameters, including the nanometer FRET distance, with heavily scattered light, thereby permitting in vivo FRET research related to the kinetics of targeted anticancer drug delivery and perhaps even a method to address the protein folding problem. I also describe imaging and communication concepts in the presence of scatter and related to spatial and spectral speckle correlations, and show how such data can be used with a forward model to form images. In greater detail, I describe our work on the control of light with small structures and aspects of optical metamaterials, and suggest opportunities. I show irregular field transformation structures which offer some remarkable features for optical signal processing, and for sources and detectors. These irregular structures are designed using an electromagnetic forward model in a nonlinear optimization framework. A more general mathematical concept is the spatial and spectral field control over scattered fields possible, based on the spatial support of the structure and the degrees of freedom exhibited through spatial definition and strength of scatter. I describe metal-insulator-metal waveguides that provide field enhancement and allow a resonant gap chain waveguide mechanism. With appropriate homogenization, metamaterials offer some important features, such as evanescent field growth from a negative refractive index and hence subwavelength imaging. I describe the properties of a simple metal-insulator stack, a quantum dot mixture, and materials that may offer convenient optical magnetism. Finally, I address the homogenization issue and relate homogenized material dispersive properties to a causal system exemplified by the Kramers-Kronig relations.