Last summer, a wedding photographer walked begrudgingly into a physics laboratory outside Rome. Feeling uninspired by the intricate machinery around him, he decided to turn off the lights. “I wanted to create a world that was a bit more intimate,” said the photographer, Marco Donghia.
He had been brought into the lab to participate in a photography contest by his sister Raffaella Donghia, a researcher at the National Institute for Nuclear Physics (INFN) in Frascati, Italy. Armed with artificial lights, Marco sat his sister at a desk across from a golden cryostat, which her colleagues use to freeze detectors to temperatures colder than the vacuum of space to hunt for subatomic particles zipping by. “I tried to capture the relationship that exists between humans and technology,” he said. “I tell love stories, so for me it’s natural.”
A panel of judges in the 2025 Global Physics Photowalk contest were impressed by the moment that Donghia captured. His photo (above) won first place in the competition organized by a collaboration of 16 particle physics laboratories around the world, from the United States to France to Japan. Dozens of amateur and professional photographers were invited to find beauty in the invisible world of force fields and subatomic particles, which blip into existence for fractions of a second and hold secrets about the origin and fate of the universe. Each participating lab entered its top three images in the global competition, with the winning entries selected by judges and in a public vote.
“I was amazed by how many excellent photos were submitted,” said Dmitri Denisov, an experimental particle physicist at Brookhaven National Laboratory on Long Island, N.Y. As the only scientist among the judges, Denisov worried that his priorities would be at odds with those of the photographers and artists on the panel, but he was surprised to find how easily they converged. The process of considering both visual aesthetics and scientific accuracy helped him appreciate the connection between science and art. “Photography is one of many ways of communicating to the public about excitement — why I’m a scientist, and why we are doing what we’re doing,” he said.
The full list of shortlisted entries can be found here. We’ve chosen a few favorites, whose visual qualities seem in some essential way to reflect the extraordinary science behind them.