TAIPEI (Taiwan News) — A new photography exhibit at the Keelung Museum of Art takes the city as its subject, treating it more as a moody cinematic playground than a sociological case study—upending routine expectations.

The exhibit, “26 seconds of sun,” takes over two rooms of the museum with artfully gritty black-and-white images, many of them textural studies in addition to portraits and landscapes.

“I wanted to do something evocative, create a bit of fiction about the city,” said Olivier Marceny, a French architectural photographer who has called Taipei home for a decade. “It’s not a straightforward portrait of Keelung’s economic or political dimensions.”

Keelung, a foggy and humid city where it rains about two-thirds of the time, features a lush landscape of green hills that surround a simmering urban sprawl with few sidewalks. The city boasts a deep-water harbor with a history as a significant port going back to the mid-19th century.

“What drew me to this project was my close attraction to harbor cities,” said Marceny. “Harbor cities are places where people with all kinds of different backgrounds and destinies intersect. They are places of fiction. Our imaginations have been nurtured and shaped by a lot of stories about harbor cities.”

“It doesn’t look like other harbor cities I’ve come across in my life,” he explained. “I like port towns, so I visit them quite often. The first thing you notice when you arrive in Keelung is how tight it is. It feels like the city is wedged between the very steep hills, the very low sky, and the ocean.”

Marceny found himself drawn to the density of the built environment and the architecture of the hillsides: “It’s all stairways and very steep slopes—a constant movement of ascending and descending.”

Beyond the sharp angles, the city can feel overcompressed, with rain, concrete, and jungle yielding a borderline oppressive ambiance. “There’s a strong sense of claustrophobia,” he said.

“Obviously, the coastline of Keelung is shaped around the port infrastructure, and that defines the city,” he said. “However, contrary to stereotypes we have about harbor cities—getaways, portals, places of exchange—Keelung feels a lot more closed unto itself. It’s like an inward-looking getaway. And I love that paradox.”

The choice to present the exhibition in black and white has roots in the city's appearance and narrative considerations. Marceny said, “When I first came here, I was intrigued by the colors, or maybe the lack of colors. I saw something very monochromatic. The coastline is mainly dark volcanic rocks and concrete.”

“With black and white, there is a sort of distancing from reality,” he said. “It allows for an abstraction or stylization that creates a more fictional space.”

The prints, which Marceny organized into diptychs and triptychs, hint at partial storylines or visual vignettes. The idea behind this, he explained, is the cinematic montage—meaning that when you group two images, it produces a third one.

“The image sequence reveals meaning,” he said. “It creates small narratives, open-ended fragments of stories that I hope the viewer can elaborate on themselves.”

“The association doesn’t have to be logical,” he added. “It can be purely emotional. It’s up to the viewer to decide what’s happening.”

“26 seconds of sun” runs until Sunday (May 25) at the Keelung Museum of Art. Admission is free.