BIOGRAPHY
My name is Antonio Romero, and I was born in Granada (Spain). I express my creativity through the use of optical microscopy photography.
In my early work, my photographs were used to illustrate research papers, PhD dissertations, and other similar publications in Spanish universities and research centers. However, all the while my interest was being drawn to the aesthetic aspects of photography.
My passion for the parallel world of the very small dates back to my teenage years, when I first observed, through a petrographic microscope, a thin slice of sedimentary rock. It contained an astounding amount of single-cell microfossils, petrified hundreds of millions of years ago but still telling a rich story about their morphology, their habitat, their staggering biodiversity, and their role in our evolutionary history. Their narration took the form of a microlandscape, like an endless mass grave full of delicate lying bodies.
Such secret scenes can be found in many of the rocks we step on while taking a walk in the park, or the countryside, or in one of the stones we skip on the surface of a lake or the sea, never stopping to think of the tiny
universe they hide.
I was captivated by the beauty and knowledge that image contained, and felt the need to commit it to memory with the help of a photography.
From that moment on I decided to begin learning whatever was necessary to make the photographs you see now: photographic technique and aesthetics, microscopy, ad the necessary scientific background.
The decades that have passed since, and the experiences I have collected, have shaped, conceptually and visually, my most recent works.
In a second stage of production, my photographs started to become more creative and reached international publications: the United States of America, Canada, Brazil, Germany, the United Kingdom, Norway, Finland, Belgium, the Netherlands, Austria, the
Czech Republic, France, Italy, and Spain saw my work published in journals like Nature (the world's most cited scientific journal), BBC Focus, or Newsweek, among others, as well as in the three most prestigious academic publishing companies, Elsevier, Springer, and Wiley-Blackwell, in their international editions and in their cover as well as inside pages.
My current interest lie in what I call "scientific art photography", which has provided me with a framework for the four projects here described.
The nineteen issues I have matured for ten years, have given as fruit the pictures I have taken in the last four years, now collected in these projects. They want to be a walk through microspaces, through the tiny corners of an infinite reality.
The iconography contained in them summarizes memorable years of visual experiences in these invisible landscapes.
"Aesthetic philosophy studies and investigates the origin of pure feeling and its manifestation, that is Art."
Immanuel Kant (Critique of Judgment).