Farming Photographs is the most ambitious development in Almudena Romero’s long-term enquiry into the ecological, material, and conceptual conditions of photography. The project continues a body of work that asks what a photograph becomes when the living world is not treated as a passive surface or an extractive resource but as an active agent in the production of images.
Romero’s grandparents were sustainable farmers in Valencia, where she learnt about cultivation, seasonal rhythms, and hands-on agricultural labour. It was in Valencia that she developed The Pigment Change, a project that reimagined photography through vegetal and biological processes, using plants to generate images through photoperiodicity, photobleaching, and photosynthesis.
Romero’s works redefine image-making as a collaboration with botanical life and position fragility not as weakness but as a form of environmental attentiveness. They also reject extractive photographic chemistry in favour of approaches that embrace transformation, impermanence, and ecological accountability. As a specialist in nineteenth-century photography, Romero revisits the anthotype process, taking a Victorian technique historically abandoned for its instability and reimagining it as a foundation for new, sustainable forms of photographic practice.
Farming Photographs extends this trajectory into the scale of the agricultural field. Developed in collaboration with INRAE Occitanie-Toulouse, the project uses photosynthesis as the active mechanism that forms an image across a one-hectare wheat field. The work does not extract pigment or apply anything onto a surface. Instead, the plants themselves write the image as they respond to light and seasonal change. Each wheat variety contributes a specific colour behaviour, turning the
field into a living photographic surface shaped by agronomic and ecological rhythms.
Sowing, tending, and harvesting belong to the process of image-making. Once the image has fully emerged and the wheat has grown through spring and summer, the crop will be harvested and milled into flour for local distribution. This final step links the artwork with everyday sustenance, connecting the cycle of cultivation to the social and ecological fabric of the community.
The project continues Romero’s commitment to photography that is ecologically viable, materially autonomous, and shaped by living systems rather than mechanical devices. Farming Photographs proposes an understanding of photography as a generative practice, where the image emerges from biological processes, environmental conditions, and the shared space between human intention and plant agency. The work invites viewers to reconsider what photography can be when it is formed through growth, metabolism, and care rather than through extraction, fixity, or permanence.
Farming Photographs is also the first iteration of a broader, multi-year line of research that will be developed through different plant species and environments. Future iterations will use long-lived, climate-resilient plants such as cacti and succulents, expanding the temporal and material possibilities of generative photography. Each species will shape the duration, colour, and behaviour of the image, deepening the project’s exploration of how plants create, sustain, or transform
photographic traces. In this wider context, Farming Photographs becomes a long-term investigation into what photographic images can become when they are rooted in ecology, guided by plant intelligence, and shaped by shared forms of care.
Timeline
• October 2025: Sowing of wheat on a one-hectare plot at INRAE (Toulouse)
• November to March 2026: Plant growth and gradual emergence of the image • April to June 2026: Period of public visibility of the artwork
• July to August 2026: Wheat harvest
• September 2026: Processing into flour and local distribution
Almudena Romero (Madrid, 1986) is a London-based visual artist whose practice explores the material, historical, and social dimensions of photography. Using organic and sustainable materials, she redefines the medium and extends photography beyond the mechanical to the biological and performative.
Her work has been exhibited internationally at the Victoria and Albert Museum, the Maison Européenne de la Photographie, the Saatchi Gallery, the Musée Albert Kahn, and the Rencontres d’Arles. She was nominated for the Prix Pictet in 2021 and has received major grants and commissions from Arts Council England, the Creative Europe Fund and the Wellcome Trust, as well as prestigious international residencies such as the Sichuan Fine Arts Institute, the Mitsubishi Ichigokan Museum and the Whitechapel Gallery.
