This paper presents an ongoing practice-based investigation into fused and deteriorated early twentieth-century glass negatives, examining how photographic damage can become a generative force in the production of new contemporary artworks. Rather than treating these negatives as damaged documents to be restored, my work approaches them as unstable photographic objects whose altered material condition—shaped by fusion, cracking, corrosion, chemical change, and image loss—produces new visual possibilities.

The research begins with glass negatives in which the original image is only partially visible or has been radically transformed by time and storage conditions. Within these damaged surfaces, I identify residual forms, fragmented motifs, and abstract structures that do not simply obscure the photograph, but reconfigure it. Through scanning, enlargement, digital isolation, recomposition, and material transformation, these elements are developed into new works that move away from the photograph’s original documentary function and toward a contemporary visual language shaped by disappearance, fragmentation, and reactivation.

The paper argues that damage should not be understood only as loss. In this practice, deterioration becomes the point of departure. The fused glass negative is no longer considered only as a wounded carrier of a past image, but as an active source of new form. What remains on the plate—its residues, distortions, adhesions, fractures, and interruptions—functions not merely as evidence of decay, but as the material through which another image can emerge. The work does not attempt to recover or reconstruct the original photograph; instead, it follows the transformation of the photographic object into a new image-object shaped by material failure.

By presenting visual stages from original fused negatives to isolated details and final artworks, the paper reflects on how contemporary artistic practice can reveal a second life within damaged photographic matter. It asks how the remains of a photographic image can be reactivated without restoration, and how abstraction can arise directly from the physical breakdown of the medium itself. The resulting works occupy a space between archive and invention, trace and transformation, and historical residue and contemporary art.

This presentation contributes to current discussions on photography’s material condition by proposing that the afterlife of the photograph may begin precisely where its original representational function starts to collapse. In this process, decay is not the end of the image, but the condition for its transformation into something new.