Glow Talk
Photoforum Pasquart
22 January 2026

Where Photography Meets Art & Science

Patricia von Ah
SEETHINK Lab · Zero Baseline of Photography

Dr. Gonzague Rebetez
Physicist · Cultural Mediator, Photoforum Pasquart

ORIGINAL EVENT:
Glow Talk - Where Photography Meets Art & Science
with Patricia von Ah

‍Photoforum Pasquart

DATE:
22 January 2026 · 18:30–19:30

VENUE:
Photoforum Pasquart
Biel/Bienne, Switzerland

SPEAKERS:
Patricia von Ah
Dr. Gonzague Rebetez

INTRODUCED BY:
Amélie Schüle
Director, Photoforum Pasquart

FORMAT:
Image-led presentation with open dialogue. English, with French and German contributions welcomed. Followed by Apéro.

CONTEXT:
Inaugural edition of Glow Talk, a new Photoforum format. Part of a members' day including a portfolio review.

Where Photography Meets Art & Science was the first Glow Talk at Photoforum Pasquart, a new format designed to bring image-led conversation into an institutional setting. Patricia von Ah, founder of Zero Baseline of Photography and SEETHINK Lab, was paired with Gonzague Rebetez, a physicist and cultural mediator at Photoforum, for a conversation that moved from Niépce's 1827 heliograph to the 2019 Event Horizon Telescope image of a black hole. The diverse audience was composed of practising photographers, artists, Photoforum members, engineers, and members of the local creative and cultural community. The Q&A was trilingual. The talk was followed by an Apéro.

THE CONVERSATION

Patricia opened with a simple observation: the device in every pocket is now also a very powerful camera. Today more images are produced in a single week than during the entire first century of photography. The Zero Baseline exists as a response. A verified collection of first photographs that restores origin and lineage to a medium today defined by volume. Eleven entries from the collection were presented across the talk, each marking a moment where photography crossed a threshold: a new territory seen, a new technique established, a limit pushed past.

Gonzague Rebetez brought physics to each image. On Röntgen's 1895 X-ray, he traced the electromagnetic spectrum and how X-rays behave like visible light on photographic paper, but reveal what the eye cannot see. On the 2012 MIT femto-photography experiment, he described how synchronised laser pulses made it possible to watch light itself move through a bottle at one trillion frames per second. On the 2019 black hole image, he explained that radio telescopes the size of the Earth, synchronised to femtosecond precision, produced a picture of something that emits no light, photographed entirely by its effect on surrounding matter.

Patricia's reading of Étienne-Jules Marey's 1886 chronophotography crystallised the talk's thesis: scientifically, the image measures motion; artistically, it transforms motion into form. The two perspectives are not in conflict. They arrive at the same image from different directions, and the image holds both. This double reading is what the Zero Baseline collection is built to make accessible.

The Q&A extended into territory the presentation had not covered. An audience member challenged the scope of the collection: if many of these images use wavelengths invisible to the human eye, why call it photography? Gonzague had wanted to include an electron microscopy image. Patricia drew the line at light as the mechanism. The boundary between photography and imaging became the most productive ground in the room. On AI, Patricia was precise: photography captures something that physically exists, even when it is unseen. AI rearranges existing data. It produces the appearance of a photographic record without a moment, without light, without the world that cast it.

SELECTED QUOTES

"Photography, at its core, can be considered an alchemy of art and science. It captures transient moments that, once passed, remain only in memory and image."

Patricia von Ah
On Zero Baseline of Photography

"During my master's thesis I discovered that photography did not have a traceable genetic code, a single referential source and foundational system for its own origins. This is why I have created the Zero Baseline of Photography."

Patricia von Ah
On Zero Baseline of Photography

"Here we do not take the subject in photo, but we take actually its effect around the surrounding as a picture. The subject disappears from the image. And it's revealed by its absence."

Dr. Gonzague Rebetez
On the first image of a black hole — Event Horizon Telescope, 2019

"What is impressive is how much this is actually a human story, that did not pop up at one moment on this planet, but at different places within the world. Because this is really the most fundamental way that we have of understanding the world — light."

Dr. Gonzague Rebetez
On the camera obscura and the multicultural origins of photography