Sojourn in the Glow - The 9th Science Images Exhibition看展覽
Science photography is more than documentation. It is a way of knowing the world. It advances seeing from an intuitive sensation into an experience that can be revisited and mutually verified, allowing fleeting phenomena to be held in place, compared, and questioned, and enabling new meanings to emerge between image and understanding. The National Museum of Natural Science continues to promote the submission program "Amazing New Horizons: Science Photography" as a medium for public reflection, so that verifiable observation does not end at presenting results, but becomes a scientific narrative that can be read, discussed, and imaginatively extended.
Launched in 2025, the 9th call received 559 entries from Taiwan and Southeast Asia, including Taiwan(544), Malaysia(6), Macau(4), Indonesia(3), and Hong Kong(2). After review by an interdisciplinary panel of experts and scholars, 64 works were selected as the core resources for this exhibition and its teaching materials. Awards include 2 Excellence Awards, 2 Quanta Youth Special Awards, 2 Koshien High School Special Awards, 2 Koshien High School Encouragement Awards, and 56 Honorable Mentions.
By occupation, the 290 submitters were predominantly students(99,34.1%), followed by freelancers(37,12.8%), electronics/manufacturing(32,11.0%), and education professionals(28,9.7%). Others include service industry(16,5.5%), professional photography(13,4.5%), and military/police/civil service/public utilities(13,4.5%), with the remaining categories totaling 52(17.9%). This profile reflects a convergence of learners and creators from diverse professions, each contributing a distinct way of observing.
By subject category, arthropods such as insects accounted for the largest share(32.8%), followed by animal composites(23.7%) and underwater and marine themes(14.2%). Subsequent categories include astronomy and meteorology(9.9%), plants and fungi(8.0%), physics and chemistry(5.3%), geology and minerals(4.0%), the microscopic world(0.6%), and others(1.5%), revealing multiple pathways of seeing, from the minute to the environmental scale, and from structural beauty to the logic of phenomena.
Photographer Berenice Abbott observed that science needs a voice, and it also needs the vivification of visual images, so that the warmth of human imagination can enter its rigorous disciplines and speak to people in terms they can understand. Photography, she argued, is preeminently intelligible. As these works are contemplated, compared, and interpreted in the gallery, images return abstract principles to an experiential ground that can be sensed and thought through. Viewers come to see how nature operates across details and scales, and through repeated acts of looking, accumulate understanding, extend reflection, and open the next questions for further exploration.