Alejandro Guijarro photographs blackboards used by the best quantum physicists for his Momentum series

Science, we keep being told, is the new rock and roll, and trend forecasters LSN Global believe our culture’s thirst for these ideas is only going to accelerate. An apt time then to come across the work of Alejandro Guijarro, a photographer who graduated from the Royal College of Art in 2010 and has been putting together his ongoing Momentum series ever since.

Alejandro visited some of the places where quantum mechanics is explored and investigated by the best brains in the business – CERN in Switzerland, Oxford and Cambridge in the UK, Stanford and UC Berkeley in the USA – and photographed the blackboards as he found them in these august institutions.

The results are really striking, removed from their context and the mind-bogglingly complex ideas they illustrate, we are left to enjoy these images on a purely aesthetic level, marvelling at the interplay between line, colour and form. Some still bear every scrawl the lecturer has made, with words and diagrams and equations chasing each other across the surface, but others have been cleaned, leaving only whispy fragments of the intense investigations that once existed.

As Alejandro says: “These are not works that pretend to hold any kind of objective truth. Stripped of their wrapping they are photographs of large drawings! Yet the process of finding, documenting and collecting them has a transmutational effect.”