Everyone at photo basel shares one thing, whether you came to buy, to sell, to study, or to look. We are here for the photograph: an artefact created by light, permanently rendered onto a surface. That shared love for the medium is easy to take for granted. This year it is worth thinking about, because photography is approaching a milestone. In 2027 it will have shaped how we see for two hundred years. It has become so omnipresent, so ordinary, that the scale of its influence is easy to miss.

I am Patricia von Ah, and I founded Zero Baseline of Photography. I came to photo basel for the reason you did: I love this medium. I have spent years exploring the genetic code of photography and the first photographs that reconnect us to where it started, so we can understand where we are, and where we are going.

Where it began

Photography did not arrive in a single moment. It was built, one first at a time. In 1827, Nicéphore Niépce fixed the earliest surviving image on a pewter plate, proving that light-sensitive chemistry could hold a visual record permanently. In 1835, William Henry Fox Talbot made the first paper negative, a process that made it possible to print one image again and again, turning photography into a reproducible system. In 1837, Louis Daguerre produced the daguerreotype, a unique positive of such clarity that it proved the medium could capture the visible world with a fidelity no drawing could match. And in 1843, Anna Atkins published Photographs of British Algae: Cyanotype Impressions, the first book illustrated with photographs, showing that the medium could catalogue knowledge and put it into circulation.

These earliest milestones established photography’s very possibility as a medium. They secured permanence, enabled reproduction, reached into scientific observation, and entered the circulation of published knowledge. Together they showed that photography could move beyond isolated experiment, and they set the framework for the medium to grow and endure: forever changing what we are able to see, and how seeing it shapes our thinking.

The name itself records the ambition. Photography, from the Greek phos, light, and graphé, writing: a photograph is light writing itself down. For two hundred years that was not a metaphor but a fact you could rely on. If a photograph existed, light had touched a real surface, and something real had been in front of the lens.

That reliability is what gave the medium its strange authority. Before photography, if you wanted to know what a distant thing looked like, you trusted whoever had described or drawn it. In 1515, Albrecht Dürer made a woodcut of a rhinoceros he had never seen, working from a letter and a rough sketch. It was wrong in almost every detail, and for three centuries Europe believed it, because his skill carried the error further than the truth would have travelled. He had simply not been there.

Photography closes that gap. It records what is, not what the maker remembered or imagined. It was never only something to admire. It was a witness, trusted in a way a drawing could not be, because the light, not the hand, had decided what it showed. That is where interpretation ends, and evidence begins.

The threshold we are standing on

Generative imaging is not the enemy of photography. It is a genuine tool, and image-makers are already using it with real skill. The problem is wider and deeper than the debate about fake pictures.

The generated image contains no light that touched a surface. No moment that happened. There were no photons, no scene, no instant in the world that the picture is a record of. It can look exactly like a photograph. It is not one, in the sense the word has carried for two centuries. There is a name for the point past which a person can no longer reliably tell an authentic image from a fabricated one: the Synthetic Reality Threshold.

Here is the strange part. A generated image looks like a photograph because the generative systems were trained on actual photographs. Hundreds of millions of them, made by people and cameras for nearly two centuries. They absorbed the quality of light through glass, the compression of a long lens, the grain of film, the way a sensor renders tone. Generative imaging inherits that visual language and reproduces it without the light or the moment that created it.

The Coalition for Content Provenance and Authenticity (C2PA) has built an open standard for embedding a verifiable record of origin into an image: who made it, when, and with what. Cameras are now beginning to write that credential at the moment of capture, building the proof into the file itself. The industry is racing to re-establish, by technical means, the very thing that used to be a given: the assurance that a photograph is a record of a real moment, written by light onto a surface.

The consequence is that the question itself has shifted. For two hundred years we asked of a photograph whether it was beautiful, whether it was true, whether it was good. Now, before any of those, sits a colder question: When anything can look like a photograph, the first thing we have to ask is if it actually is one.

That question is new, and it changes how we understand photography. It turns the matter of what counts as real from a purely academic point into a generationally urgent one. Authenticity is becoming the thing of worth.

Why the beginning is the steady ground

Photography has a Point Zero. It has a beginning, and a long line of evolution after it. In 1878, Eadweard Muybridge froze a galloping horse and settled a question the eye could never answer: at full stride, all four hooves leave the ground at once. In 1885, Wilson Bentley began photographing snowflakes through a microscope, and across more than five thousand frames he never found two the same. In 2012, a team at MIT recorded light itself in motion, at a trillion frames a second. In 2020, an eight-year exposure by Regina Valkenborgh held 2,953 arcs of the sun in a single frame. None of these were made to be beautiful. Each one let us see what the eye alone never could, and changed what was known to be true.

These are some of the photographs Zero Baseline holds. Not the earliest picture, but the most consequential: the one that crossed a threshold, proved something real, or opened a part of the medium that did not exist before. That distinction is the whole argument. Each entry must pass the same four parameters, verified as authentic, made by photographic means, set in a scientific or artistic context, and established as a genuine first, then traced through the archival record and confirmed based on the available evidence.

Behind every film and photograph seen today, there is a first photograph that initially uncovered something new.

People often hear the word history when I describe it. They picture an archive, something curated and closed, filed away behind glass. It is not that. Zero Baseline is a record of discovery. I am not curating these images out of nostalgia. I have chosen them because they are the foundation to stand on. When you no longer know which images to trust, the ones that founded that very idea are where we begin again. When anything can look like a photograph, the images that wrote the medium's genetic code become the baseline it can stand on.

Why now, and why here

2027 gives us a year to celebrate photography’s two hundredth birthday, and museums, archives and galleries across the world are turning toward the anniversary. The bicentennial is not only a candle on a cake. It is the moment the medium’s origin stops being a date in the past and becomes the thing we desperately need. A stable foundation: something to restore trust in what we see, to strengthen visual literacy, and to keep us connected to where the medium began.

photo basel is a space full of people who share the love for the medium. It is a place where the questions are openly asked, where new work argues with old assumptions, and where the conversation about what photography is becoming has already begun. You feel it here, standing in front of the work. That shared conviction, the thing we all walk in with, is exactly the awareness the next ten years will ask us: what we see, and once we see it, how it influences us.

photo basel is dedicated to photography-based art, and that phrase opens the door wide. It holds work made with cameras and work that argues with them, experiments and open questions about what the medium can be. Underneath the whole spectrum sits a shared starting point: a room full of people who know what a real image is. Light writing itself onto a surface is a different truth than the imitation of it, no matter how convincing it might be.

The oldest photograph in the Zero Baseline is Niépce's view from the window at Le Gras, made in 1827. He waited more than eight hours for that exposure, not certain it would work. I sometimes wonder what he would make of where we are today, and of a world where the device in your pocket is also a camera, where more photographs are made in a single week than in photography's entire first century. I like to think he would look back at that window, at that long wait, and say to himself: I did that. And people are still looking.

His plate first answered a simple question, and it is the one we are being asked again, more sharply than ever. What does it mean to capture something real, and make it last. These firsts matter now, and the photographs we came here to see have never mattered more.

Each first began as experiment and discovery. To hold them is to preserve a foundation: the evolution of the medium, and what seeing something for the first time can teach us. That is why I built this.

Patricia von Ah

Founder, Zero Baseline of Photography and SEETHINK Lab

photo basel

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