Tag Archives: Photography

Visualizing the Invisible: Resonance, Water and Light as Photographic Event

‘Visualizing the Invisible: Resonance, Water and Light as Photographic Event’ traces a four decade investigation into photography as physical event rather than descriptive mechanism. Spanning the caustic works of the Vanitas, Glass and Ophelia series through to the recent Cymatic Water + Light body of work, this essay proposes that invisible forces — resonance, pressure, frequency, surface tension — do not require invention. They require conditions through which they become legible. Working exclusively in analogue process, Alexander James Hamilton constructs systems in which frequency, liquid and light are brought into controlled relation. The resulting photographs are not representations of these forces but their material consequence. Authorship, in this context, is not diminished through physical process. It is intensified by it.

HELIOS

Tom Liggett is a London-based artist and final-year BA (Hons) Photography student at Arts University Bournemouth. His practice operates at the intersection of photography and science, investigating how invisible forces such as radiation, oxidation and electrical discharge can generate images beyond the limits of conventional photographic processes.

World’s biggest astronomy camera seeks to answer pressing questions about the universe

Joshua Weston is a PhD Candidate, School of Mathematics and Physics, Queen’s University Belfast.
“My research sits at the intersection of time-domain astrophysics, machine learning, and the societal implications of large-scale scientific automation. In particular, I am interested in how algorithmic systems can be designed, monitored and interpreted to translate high-volume survey data into reliable, high-fidelity transient discoveries, while retaining meaningful human oversight.
My current research focuses on:
Machine Learning for Transient Discovery and Host Association: I develop and deploy ML pipelines for real–bogus classification and extragalactic transient–host matching in major sky surveys. For the Asteroid Terrestrial-impact Last Alert System (ATLAS), I retrained convolutional neural networks that reduced false positives in the data and significantly lowered human validation demands. I have also built software tools for the Vera C. Rubin Observatory’s Legacy Survey of Space and Time Deep Drilling Fields, integrating archival data and applying interpretable ML to improve host galaxy identification for faint, high-redshift transients. Ongoing work focuses on early alert filtering via brokers such as Lasair and constructing robust transient samples.
AI, Citizen Science, and Responsible Survey Automation: As part of the Leverhulme Interdisciplinary Network on Algorithmic Solutions (LINAS), I examine how AI systems reshape discovery, expertise and public engagement in astronomy. I am developing a citizen-science framework to label early Rubin alerts and systematically compare expert and public classifications, quantifying their impact on model performance, bias and interpretability. This work situates large-survey automation within broader questions of transparent and sustainable human–AI collaboration in scientific research.”

Polar Light

Steve Giovinco is a New York-based photographer and a Yale MFA graduate. His night photographs at the edge of inhabited places trace evidence of epic but subtle change. Informed by the environment, history, and culture, his most recent work documents the extremely remote arctic Greenland with the goal of visualizing transformation since climate-related statistics can be difficult to grasp. His work is held in numerous public collections, including the Brooklyn Museum, the Museum of Fine Arts, Houston, and the California Museum of Photography.

Earth, A Cosmic Spectacle

Louise Beer is an artist and curator, born in Aotearoa New Zealand, now working England. Louise uses installation, moving image, photography, writing, participatory works and sound to explore humanity’s evolving understanding of Earth’s environments and the cosmos. Her experience of living under two types of night sky, the first in low level light polluted areas in Aotearoa, and the second in higher level light polluted cities and towns in England, has deeply informed her practice. She explores how living under dark skies, or light polluted skies, can change our perception of grief, the climate crisis and Earth’s deep time history and future.

Perceiving Reality: The Enthalpy of Existence

‘Perceiving Reality: The Enthalpy of Existence’ traces a decade long investigation by British artist Alexander James Hamilton into the behaviour of light, matter, and perception as thermodynamic systems. Spanning the Siberian projects ‘Oil + Water’ (2013–2016) and ‘Empirical Research & Evidence’ (2021–2023), the work unites scientific observation with aesthetic consciousness. Through analogue photography and sustainable material practice, Hamilton visualises entropy, equilibrium, and environmental change as intertwined conditions. The resulting corpus proposes that perception itself functions as empirical instrument: a form of energy exchange in which to observe is to participate in creation.

Quantum leap: how we discovered a new way to create a hologram

Hugo Defienne is a Lecturer and Marie Curie Fellow, School of Physics & Astronomy, University of Glasgow.

“I am a lecturer at the University of Glasgow, working with the Xtreme Light research group. I am an experienced researcher in the fields of quantum optics, optical imaging and coplex optical media. My research aims to harness quantum properties of light to develop new applications in imaging, communication and information processing.
I started my career by a PhD in the Kastler-Brossel laboratory in France (2012-2015) during which I pioneered the use of quantum optical states in scattering and complex media. I then extended my research scope to quantum imaging as a postdoc at Princeton University in the USA (2016-2018). There, I initiated a new research direction by merging quantum imaging with structured illumination approaches. In 2019, I was awarded a Marie Skłodowska-Curie fellowship (MSCA) and took up a post-doctoral researcher post at the University of Glasgow (UK) to develop quantum communication approaches with single-photon sensitive cameras. In the same year, I secured a position as a lecturer in physics there.”

Beyond the Bounds of Thought

Artist and writer, Richard Bright, has addressed the relationship between art, science and consciousness for over 40 years. He studied Fine Art and Physics before founding The Interalia Centre in 1990. Since then, he has lectured extensively on art and science and written articles on James Turrell, Andy Goldsworthy and Susan Derges, among others. He has exhibited both nationally and internationally and was the recipient of the ‘Visions of Science’ Award, The Edge, Andrew Brownsward Gallery, University of Bath (Second Prize Winner). Co-author of ‘The Art of Science’ (Welbeck Publishers, 2021).

Boris Eldagsen: The Woman Who Never Was

The winners of the 2023 Sony World Photography Awards (SWPA) – reputedly the world’s largest photography competition – were announced in March. The image that won the Creative section was by the German artist Boris Eldagsen. Entitled ‘The Electrician’, it is a haunting image of two women: the older hiding behind the younger. A man’s hand appears mysteriously from out of frame. The vibe is 1940s retro and, while the image has its own enigmatic beauty, there is something uncanny about it.

Perhaps what underlies this sense of the uncanny are two facts: the young women and her shy companion never existed… and this is not a photograph. The image is from a series called ‘Pseudomnesia’ created by the artist using an Artificial Intelligence (AI) image-generation system called DALL E2.

Elemental Forms

Nadezda Nikolova is a Croatian-Bulgarian-American photographic artist working with wet plate collodion photograms. Her practice is informed by an experimental approach to early photographic processes and her interest in the image as an object. The abstract landscape series, ‘Elemental Forms’, ‘Landscapes and Elemental Forms’, ‘Landscape Rearticulated’, emerged as the artist’s direct response to her surroundings and to feeling a sense of well-being and security within the landscape. She believes that each locale has its specific identity, history, and emotional imprint.