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Photo-history’s origin as a distinct field of study within art history in the 1970’s and 1980’s cannot be extricated from its privileged status within the postmodern critique of representation. Participants in what Eve Sedgwick, in 2003’s essay “Paranoid Reading and Reparative Reading,” called the broader paranoid tendency (an injunction in the critical humanities towards demystification rooted in Marx, Freud, and Nietzsche’s “hermeneutics of suspicion”), photo-historians such as Allan Sekula, John Tagg, and Abigail Solomon-Godeau were unified, whatever their topic, by a determination to unmask the codes through which photography’s seeming transparency naturalized and perpetuated systems of social oppression. By the early 2000’s, however, the paranoid paradigm in photo-history began to be supplanted by a method approximating Sedgwick’s notion of the “reparative”: an “accretive” method seeking to restore wholeness to its objects so that “selves and communities can extract sustenance from them,” permitting “surprise” and “joy” rather than disillusionment. Exemplified in the 2014 edited volume Feeling Photography, its title a riposte to Victor Burgin’s 1982 anthology Thinking Photography, the reparative method emphasizes photography’s affective and tactile dimensions, privileging the phenomenological, open-ended encounter between photographer and viewer as the primary site for producing internal, ineffable meanings. As technological developments (and challenges to photography’s definition) such as generative AI render renewed reflection on photo-historical methods urgent, this panel seeks to move beyond the dichotomy of paranoid and reparative, soliciting proposals that model new methods outside this binary or provide novel historical and theoretical perspectives on the transformation of photo-historical methods since the 1970's.