Why I Built This

I went back to school because something was bothering me. Not in a productive way. In the way a question bothers you when you cannot stop pulling at it.

I had been making photographs for years. I thought I understood the medium. But there were images I kept returning to, images that did not behave like other images, and I could not explain what they were doing to me. Some photographs stopped me. They demanded something. I wanted to know why.

That search brought me to a master’s thesis, and the thesis brought me to first photographs.

When I discovered that no archive of photography’s firsts existed anywhere, I was astounded. Not surprised. Astounded. These were the moments when something was seen for the first time. When a scientific possibility became an image. When a photographer looked through a lens and found something that had never been found before. And there was no record of them together. No single place that gathered them and said: these are the ones that mattered. This is where it began.

I knew immediately that had to change.

The moment it became clear

But before Zero Baseline had a name, there was a moment that gave it a foundation.

I was working on my thesis. Notes pinned to the wall. Ideas not quite connecting. I pulled a duvet over my head and looked at nothing. And something happened. I felt it physically: the front of my face was seeing, and somewhere just behind that was thinking. Two distinct things happening together, in a relationship I had never been able to name before. That is where SEETHINK came from. That is where Zero Baseline came from. Not from an idea. From an experience.

Seeing and thinking are not separate acts. They do not happen in sequence. They happen simultaneously, and the quality of one changes the quality of the other. That is what photography does when it works. That is what the firsts do, always. They do not just show you something. They make you understand that you are seeing it.

Discovery, not history

When I describe the project, people often hear history. They assume it is an archive. Something curated and closed, filed away behind glass. It is not that.

Zero Baseline is a record of discovery. The earliest surviving photograph of the Moon, made by John William Draper in 1840, is not interesting because it is old. It is interesting because of what it took: the positioning, the exposure, the attempt. The persistence. Dan Streible confirmed the attribution¹ more than a century and a half later, because someone kept looking. That is what this project is about. The looking. The finding. The willingness to keep going.

One of the most recent entries in the collection is from 2020. Regina Valkenborgh made the longest photographic exposure ever recorded. It is contemporary. It was made by a woman. It shows everything Zero Baseline is about: discovery, invention, exploration. History is not the frame. Discovery is.

If I could witness one moment in photography’s history, it would be Étienne-Jules Marey in 1886, shaking a flexible rod. A simple, elegant movement that shows so much: the planning, the frame adjusted to fit everything in width, himself inside the image as the instrument of measure. When I look at that image, I want to be in the room with him. It makes me happy. That is what the collection is for.

The standard and the doubt

I hold some images with more uncertainty than others. Research in this field is difficult. There is either too much information or very little, and the gap between them is where mistakes live. With more time and funding, I would go deeper: tracking original sources, scanning paper prints, verifying dates at the point of the object itself. That work continues. The methodology is not a finished thing.

What I know is this: if I found that something was not correct, I would not hesitate to change it. The standard is what the collection is protecting. Not any individual image.

There are two entries in Zero Baseline that are exceptions to the photography rule. Neither was made with a traditional photographic technique. The first is Fabrizio Carbone’s 2015 image of light behaving simultaneously as a wave and a particle. It is an image of light itself, the very essence of what photography captures. It belongs. The second is Illuminate, made by Chelsi Alise Cocking and photographed by Jimmy Day in 2023: a work that uses the tools of today to recreate what the movement images of photography’s history allowed us to see. Both are exceptions. Both are included because they are essential to the definition of the medium.

Not the mountain, the next step

People sometimes ask whether this project is too ambitious. It is ambitious. But I have never approached it as a mountain to climb. I have approached it as a series of next steps. That shift changes everything. You do not need to see the whole thing. You need to see what is directly in front of you.

Zero Baseline has been moving forward since my master’s thesis. Every time there was capacity, it moved. Not quickly. Not all at once. Step by step.

What I want them to feel

My experience teaching young students has shown me the surprise that comes when they learn for the first time how photography began. A moment of wow. They use the medium every day and know almost nothing about where it came from. I want students to feel that. Inspired. Something they did not know before. A deeper understanding for what photography is and what it has given us. That feeling is not a side effect of the platform. It is the point.

Niépce at the window

The oldest photograph in the collection is Niépce’s view from the window at Le Gras, made in 1826 or 1827. He waited more than eight hours for that exposure. He was not certain it would work. When I think about what he would make of Zero Baseline, I hope he would be proud. That he would think back to that window, that long wait, and say: I did that. And people are still looking.

That is why I built this.

FOOTNOTE:

¹ Dan Streible, Earth’s Moon (1840), Orphan Film Symposium, 2021.

RESOURCES:

Explore the collection chronologically

Read the verification methodology

Read more about Patricia von Ah

© 2026 Patricia von Ah — Zero Baseline of Photography, SEETHINK Lab. All rights reserved.