When you leave a leaf in full sunlight, it receives a huge amount of energy. And the leaf, in order to cope with
the energy excess that it's receiving, changes pigments. The plant is not necessarily drying out. What the plant is
doing is change pigments, because yellow pigments, carotenoids, can dissipate energy excess as heat.
So if it receives too much sunlight, they have a mechanism to survive, to cope with the overdose of sunlight.
So, my name is Almudena Romero, and I'm an artist working with photography, mainly. And my work kind
of researches the spaces and forms that photography can take. And the research that I'm doing now,
it's more related to like, sustainable photographic forms and materials.
I use a picture frame, like the standard £1 picture frame. And then what I do is that I clip together an image that
I have printed on my printer. It's a home printer, and I put together the board, then the leaf, then the image printed,
and then the glass and I kind of sandwich everything together with a lot of pressure and put it to the sunlight.
So what happens is the light passes through the paper and the areas that have more ink, the areas that are
black, protect the chlorophyll pigment, protect the green pigments. So the areas that are black in my image will
be black on the final leaf. And the areas that are white, or transparent, let the light pass through and that
bleaches the chlorophyll pigments. That forces the pigment change. So the clear areas of my image are the clear areas
of the final print.
'Growing Concerns' draws a parallel between how movement of goods and capitals have historically
been facilitated, while there is more and more restriction for movement of people and the growing interest to
increase these restrictions because of nationalist and populist movements. And it actually started – I went to
Covent Garden Market in Vauxhall [London] and it shocked me the amount of plants and roses and flowers
that are imported on a daily basis, while people from the countries where those plants are grown, face
incredibly complicated barriers. So, for instance, in Covent Garden, we import flowers from Colombia and
South Africa on a daily basis. However, a Colombian person to travel to the UK – it's an incredibly complicated
process. So it was that vision of traffic that motivated me to do the work.
But on the other side, it allowed me to talk about many other aspects that are linked to migration, the colonial
agenda, and how plants actually supported the development of that.
Some of the images are migrants that have made iconic contributions. So one of them is Mariah Idrissi, which is
the first hijab Muslim model, British model. And what I like from her is that at the age of 22, instead of
accommodating the way she looks to fit in the fashion industry, she has told the fashion industry to
accommodate her views on herself.
So all of this research on our organic materials and chlorophyll and how chlorophyll beaches and other
pigments. It's actually a 19th century research. So it's the beginning of color photography. Back in the 19th
century, John Herschel and other scientists, like Mary Somerville, they were researching how could they print
images in color.
And they were already doing experiments on plant leaves and using photosynthesis to produce images.
People like me, who are interested in analog photography, we don't really have the choice, we have to look for more
sustainable materials, because photographic chemistry, it's quite aggressive to the environment. So if we want
to have a sustainable practice, if we want to be artists, or photographers in 15 years, we have to move towards
sustainable materials, like, it's a need that we have right now.
Because in a few decades, it might be the only way of having physical images, like the truth is that we now
have to finally, or fully, develop a research that has started in the 19th century that wasn't fully developed,
because back then it wasn't a priority. But today it is and there are several of us pushing to finish this research.
Because our needs have changed.