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What kind of object is a faded photograph? When what was pictured in it has become unrecognizable, is it actually a photograph anymore, or does it operate within a different regime of meaning? This panel invites conceptual explorations of the role of fading in a medium known for fixing. The tendency of images to decay was an essential element of the science and the aesthetics of the early photographic surface, and it remains a central concern in the care, display, and preservation of photographs in museums and archives today. Yet our most prominent photographic histories implicitly center upon the “display worthy” print—or in some famous cases, carefully manipulated reproductions of a faded relic—rather than upon the much broader archive of faded, decayed, damaged, and illegible photographs that remain in storage in collections across the world. What kind of histories can be told from the faded photograph, its trajectory of change and transformation, or the decaying photographic archive? What, and whom, are we saving such objects for? What would it look like to cultivate a curatorial or scholarly approach to photography that accepts and embraces the ongoing decay of the image as an essential part of its chemical nature, its aesthetics, and its cultural life as an object? This panel invites submissions from those working on photography from multi-disciplinary perspectives, including history of art, social and cultural history, history of science, anthropology, conservation, or critical heritage studies.