Martin Barnes, Senior Curator of Photography at the V&A, is Romero’s champion for The Wick. “Almudena’s sustainable photographic practices offer a refreshing perspective on our modern world, linking historical techniques with current environmental concerns. Her reinterpretation of Victorian photographic methods, such as the anthotype process using plant pigments, is particularly relevant in today’s ecological context. Her practice not only revives these experimental analogue techniques but also repositions them within a contemporary framework, prompting critical reflections on the nature, role, and future of photography.”

Prompted by wider questions around “plant agency, land use, and artistic practice”, Romero’s recent projects include The Pigment Change and Photographies Vivantes, drawing on natural cycles of growth and decay, reframing photography as an embodied and ecological process. “I’m interested in creating with, rather than simply representing, organic life. The Museum of Plant Art takes this further by proposing the plant as artist. The thinking that informs my work is shaped not by art historical references alone, but by non-anthropocentric philosophy, early photographic experiments of the nineteenth century, and the biological, cultural and institutional systems that structure perception.”

Romero’s practice also aims to make photography more collaborative with nature. “Working with leaves, seeds, and fields as active agents, my practice expands the definition of photographic image-making beyond mechanical, digital or analogue reproduction, allowing the photographic to unfold in biological time.”

She is currently developing a particularly ambitious collaboration: with agricultural research centre INRAE in France, where they will cultivate a 20,000m² living photographic image composed of wheat varieties, selected for their chromatic qualities. The project, titled Farming a Photograph, will be unveiled in Toulouse next year. “The project engages photosynthesis as a tangible methodology for art making, while interrogating authorship, monoculture, and ecological responsibility within the context of the Anthropocene. Following the harvest, the wheat will be milled into flour, extending the work into the domain of subsistence and everyday life. Rooted in biodiversity and resistance to industrial agriculture, the project reimagines photography as a living artistic practice grounded in biological co-production, positioning plants not as subjects but as active agents in the making of the work.”

It’s awe-inspiring work that proves how artistic ideas can influence thinking in other disciplines, and vice versa. Yet for all the accolades she’s achieved to date, Romero says, “perhaps the most important thing for me is allowing the work to remain slow, unruly, and metabolically honest—one that resists capture and insists on ephemerality and evolution as modes of critical persistence.”