Over the last twenty years, the study of photography’s history has been characterized by, among other things, two major strands: a concentration on the photograph’s status as an object and a concern with the decidedly virtual quality of its images and practices. The 2019 conference „Material Immaterial: Photographs in the 21st Century“ considered these two directions in photographic conservation by asking if the physical photograph still matters today as a source of teaching, learning, and scholarship when the intangibles of code now direct the production and archiving of images. Now from a methodological direction, this symposium seeks to inquire further into the longer historical implications of the distance increasingly perceived between photography’s status as an object and its life as what could be called the intangible „photographic.“