IUPAP Photo Contest: Celebrating Quantum Imagination—Morty Fangiglio

At a Glance: 1st place photo, Trapped Ions, by Morty Fangiglio

To celebrate the 100 years since the formulation of quantum mechanics, the International Union of Pure and Applied Physics (IUPAP) launched an international photo contest to capture the beauty of quantum research and technology developed worldwide, as well as the presence of quantum science and technology in our daily lives. 

The competition, part of the International Year of Quantum Science and Technology (IYQ2025) global events, opened submissions on June 9 in two categories:  

Beyond Our Eyes

“Dedicated to images captured using scientific instruments or produced through simulations of quantum processes, bringing to life phenomena we can’t usually see.”

At a Glance

Welcomed photos “that revealed the aesthetic beauty of scientific instruments, visible quantum effects in nature, such as light patterns, or creative interpretations inspired by quantum concepts.”

Through these categories, IUPAP encouraged scientists, students, and enthusiasts to look beyond technical boundaries and explore the poetry within science. 

The IUPAP–IYQ2025 Photo Contest received submissions from around the world until August 31. After rigorous review, the jury selected winning photographs for their scientific relevance and artistic quality. The IUPAP announced the six winners (three for each category) on October 24. In this series of IYQ blog posts, we intend to feature each winning photograph and the artist who created it, one for each post. 

Trapped Ions, photo by Morty Fangilio, 3rd place in the category at a Glance

Morty Fangilio is a visual artist and designer exploring how quantum physics and image-making can help us rethink time, matter, and perception. After nearly a decade working in editorial design in New York for The Wall Street Journal and Men’s Health magazine, amongst many others, I’m now based in Basel, Switzerland, where I recently completed a Master of Design at the Hochschule für Gestaltung und Kunst Basel FHNW, where my research focused on the aesthetics of particle and quantum physics.

The submitted image is a digital scan of an original photogram made in the HGK darkroom in June 2024. I stacked several sheets of clear acrylic about 9 cm apart on the enlarger baseboard and arranged spherical objects and scattered micro-elements such as beads, decorative acrylic balls, and metals between the layers, then exposed them on resin-coated UV light-sensitive pearl paper. The setup imagines atoms in superposition, “caught” in a single instant inside a trapped-ion quantum computer—a brief, luminous collapse of possibilities into one held moment.