In the quest for the smart materials for photonics, photonics crystals and metamaterials have emerged, intrinsically based on periodic arrangements. In practice, most of fabricated materials are only partially ordered, as disorder is omnipresent in real structures. Partially ordered (or correlated) materials are also common in Nature. Instead of considering disorder as an unavoidable nuisance, embracing its complexity to design new materials for photonics is an emerging strategy. In this lecture we illustrate the richness on correlated disordered materials for the control of light-matter interaction based on a few examples, including depolarization of light in scattering materials, transparency induced by correlations, and the connection between spatial non-locality and negative refraction.