This article was born in a borderland: the point at which the precision of science meets the freedom of imagination. Its aim is neither to turn physics into illustration nor photography into proof, but to use analogy as a creative tool—a way of observing how two distant languages can question the same reality.

On one side stands classical physics, with its recognisable bodies, trajectories, causes and effects. Ideally corresponding to this view is classical, figurative photography: sharp images, identifiable subjects, ordered perspectives and moments that seem to occupy a precise position in space and time.

On the other side lies quantum physics, which introduces probabilities, superpositions, correlations and phenomena that cannot always be translated into everyday experience. Its poetic counterpart is abstract and experimental photography: double exposures, intentional movement, reflections, interference, colours and forms that do not describe an object but open up a field of possibilities. Science provides the structure; imagination transforms it into visual experience.

Relating physics and photography requires more than placing a formula beside an evocative image. It requires a method: identify a scientific principle, understand how it changes our idea of reality, and translate it into a photographic process capable of producing an analogous visual experience.

This does not mean directly photographing quantum mechanics, of course. A long exposure is not a quantum phenomenon, and a double exposure does not prove that a body can be in two places at the same time. Analogy operates on another level: it creates a connection between two languages without confusing them.

The method always follows the same path. The deterministic trajectory of classical physics becomes a sharp, geometric composition. Quantum superposition finds an echo in double exposure. Entanglement is evoked by images that are separate yet visually inseparable. The Higgs field suggests photographs in which an invisible presence can be recognised only through the effects it produces on matter.

Each analogy follows the same structure: concept, experience, process.

Imagine a marble crossing a table. If we knew its position, velocity and the forces acting on it with sufficient precision, we could calculate its path. This is the familiar image of classical mechanics: a universe made of recognisable bodies, causes and effects, positions and trajectories.

Figurative photography shares this confidence in the legibility of the world. A runner is frozen at the exact point when a foot lifts from the ground. A building is photographed head-on, its vertical lines controlled. A glass falls and the shutter freezes the droplets in mid-air. Time is divided into moments; space is ordered through visual coordinates.

Documentary and architectural photography, geometric still life and scientific photography are the genres closest to this view. The subject is identifiable and its boundaries are clear. The camera seems to declare: “This object was here, at this moment.” The image retains a centre and allows us to imagine a before and an after.

This is the world as trajectory. But move too close, slow the shutter or admit a reflection, and the certainty of the contour begins to yield.

In the quantum domain, representing a particle as a tiny marble is no longer sufficient. The theory describes distributions of possibilities and makes it possible to calculate the probability of different measurement outcomes. The question changes: not only “Where is it?” but “In what ways might it manifest itself?”

Abstract photography makes a similar shift when it relinquishes the immediate identification of a subject and constructs a perceptual field in which multiple interpretations remain available. The most effective technique for evoking this transition is ICM, Intentional Camera Movement: during a relatively long exposure, the photographer deliberately moves the camera.

A forest becomes a series of vertical lines; the sea is transformed into bands of colour; a crowd loses its individual identities and becomes a flow. The photograph records a real event but does not return an unambiguous position. A point of light is distributed along a trail, and a figure appears in several areas of the image.

A quantum system can be described through a superposition of possible states. This does not simply mean that we do not know which alternative has already been chosen, as when a coin remains hidden beneath a hand. Superposition belongs to the description of the system before measurement.

The most immediate photographic translation is double or multiple exposure. Imagine a portrait superimposed on a landscape. A person’s profile contains branches, windows and fragments of sky. We are not looking at two photographs placed side by side, but at a single image in which two identities occupy the same space.

The face does not disappear into the forest, and the forest is not reduced to a background. Both remain present. The eye oscillates between human figure, landscape, memory and metamorphosis. By photographing the same person in two positions without advancing the film, the body may appear seated and standing, near and far. This is not physical simultaneity. It is perceptual simultaneity.

Multiple exposure shows that an image can contain several possibilities without being forced to resolve immediately into a single reading.

Entanglement is one of the most surprising aspects of quantum theory. When two particles are prepared in an entangled state, some of their properties must be described through a shared state. It is no longer enough to assign each particle a completely independent condition: the decisive information lies in the relationship between them.

Measurements produce correlations even when the particles are very far apart. This does not make it possible to send instantaneous messages faster than light, but it challenges the intuitive idea of a reality composed only of separate objects, each complete in itself.

In photography, the genre best suited to evoking entanglement is the abstract diptych. Imagine two works placed at opposite ends of a room. In the first, a red curve crosses a black background; in the second, a black curve crosses a red field. Taken separately, they seem incomplete. Seen together, they produce a system: positive and negative, presence and absence, question and answer.

Physical distance does not interrupt their relationship. A project might begin in two distant places: the surface of the sea in Sicily and the folds of a fabric in Berlin, photographed with the same light and the same compositional structure. The images do not show the same subject, yet they seem to belong to the same visual event.

Another possibility is mirrored photography: every chromatic variation introduced in one image reappears inverted or transformed in the other. Meaning resides in neither work in isolation; it emerges from correlation. Unity, then, does not require proximity. The true subject is not a thing, but the bond that prevents the two images from being completely separate.

Photons and electrons can produce interference patterns: in some areas the effects reinforce one another; in others they cancel out. What appears on the screen arises from a combination of possibilities and cannot simply be attributed to a single classical path.

Abstract photography can evoke this logic through reflections, grids, transparencies and moiré. Two regular patterns photographed one over the other generate visual waves that belong entirely to neither. Two glass surfaces reflect different lights and construct a third space. A curtain superimposed on a façade transforms straight lines into vibrations.

Moiré is especially effective because it makes visible something born solely from the relationship between structures. The resulting pattern was not present in either grid alone; it appears when the two systems interfere. The photographer can build a series by passing light through rippled glass, water surfaces or semi-transparent materials. Once again, the true subject is the encounter.

In quantum mechanics, measurement is not a simple “glance.” It is a physical interaction between the system and the experimental apparatus. Human consciousness alone does not magically create reality: this clarification is essential when science enters the territory of art.

Photography can nevertheless draw a more general consequence from this: we cannot always separate what we observe from the way we observe it. A polarising filter, coloured glass or a reflective surface changes the image according to position and light. In iridescent or lenticular installations, the work changes as we move.

The Higgs boson has been nicknamed the “God particle,” a popular label as effective as it is misleading. It is not a divine particle, nor does it explain the origin of the universe on its own. Its importance is connected to the Higgs field, which is present throughout space and with which certain elementary particles interact, thereby acquiring mass.

The boson can be understood as an observable manifestation of that field. Its discovery confirmed a fundamental element of the Standard Model. To construct a photographic analogy, however, it is unhelpful to represent it as a point of light or a cosmic explosion. It is more interesting to concentrate on the invisible field and the effects it produces on whatever passes through it.

Fluid photography offers a first language. Drops of ink, pigments or suspended particles pass through liquids of different densities. Some forms glide quickly; others slow down, thicken and acquire substance. The medium, apparently empty, becomes the protagonist because it changes the behaviour of matter.

A second language is macro photography of immersed materials: powders in resin, bubbles in glass, pigments in oil. The field is not shown directly; it becomes perceptible through what it changes. We might also imagine an abstract portrait made with transparent veils. The body is almost invisible, but the fabric stretches and deforms around its presence. We do not see the subject clearly; we see the way space reacts to its passage.

The invisible, then, is not necessarily the same as emptiness. It can possess structure, influence what passes through it and contribute to the form of the visible. The photographic question becomes: how can we show a presence known only through its effects?

The photogram, created by placing objects directly on a photosensitive surface, dispenses with the traditional camera and with perspective. It records the contact between light, matter and surface. The object leaves a trace but often loses its identity: it becomes shadow, silhouette, an area of transparency.

What we see is not the object itself, but the effect of its interaction with light. The photogram thus becomes a meeting point for several concepts: measurement as interaction, the field as indirect presence, the particle as trace. A series constructed with powders, threads, glass and organic materials would preserve the event even after the matter that produced it had been removed.

Classical photography taught us to look for things: the face, the landscape, the event, the decisive moment. Classical mechanics taught us to imagine bodies endowed with position, velocity and trajectory. Quantum vision and abstract photography shift our attention. They do not erase objects, but show that an isolated object is not always the most interesting unit through which to understand reality.

Sometimes what matters is the probability with which something can appear. Sometimes it is the superposition of possibilities. Sometimes it is the correlation between distant elements. At other times it is an invisible field, recognisable only through the effects it produces.

Abstract photography then becomes something more than a formal exercise. Colour, light, grain and movement do not serve to decorate reality, but to challenge the way we believe we know it.

There is no definitive break between the precision of figuration and the openness of abstraction. What changes is the question. First we ask what things are. Then we ask through which relationships, possibilities and interactions they become what we see.

And perhaps this is the deepest point of encounter between physics and photography: both begin with looking, but become truly interesting when looking is no longer enough.