Lisa Barnard and Isadora Romero: After Nature

The Crespo Foundation presents You Only Look Once by Lisa Barnard and Notes on How to Build a Forest by Isadora Romero, winners of the After Nature: Ulrike Crespo Photography Prize 25 — an 80,000 EUR annual award from the Crespo Foundation and C/O Berlin honouring two international artists using photography and lens-based media to consider how environments are sensed, represented, and actively shaped within interconnected ecological, social, and technological contexts. It is dedicated to the photographer and philanthropist Ulrike Crespo.

 In You Only Look Once, Lisa Barnard (1967, UK) examines forms of perception as they operate across animal, human and machine systems. Taking the Salton Sea, a highly saline and hazardous lake in California, as a jumping off point, Barnard’s research-based project brings together photography, video, and sound to address military testing grounds, lithium extraction, autonomous technologies, and contemporary systems of machine vision. Referencing the real-time object detection algorithm YOLO, the work foregrounds both the efficiency and the limitations of machine perception, emphasizing the distinction between data processing and conscious experience, and reflecting on how visual technologies not only register the world, but actively participate in shaping it within interconnected ecological and technological crises.

Lisa Barnard is an artist, researcher, and teacher whose practice combines an interest in the aesthetics and materiality of photography with political questions surrounding the military-industrial complex, technological development, new ecologies, and perception.

In Notes on How to Build a Forest, Isadora Romero (1987, Ecuador) approaches the cloud forests of Ecuador as dynamic, inhabited ecosystems shaped by long histories of coexistence, use, and care. Developed through close collaboration with local communities, scientists, and artisans, the research-driven project brings together photography, textiles, video, and sound to examine the ecological, social, and cultural dimensions of these tropically montane environments, that are characteristically covered in persistent clouds. Moving from the Andean highlands to the Pacific coast, Romero traces indigenous trade routes, ancestral plant knowledge, and community-led conservation practices, foregrounding the forest as a space of exchange and collective responsibility. The work resists viewing forests as static or pristine landscapes, instead emphasizing their role as living systems shaped by human and nonhuman relationships in the context of ongoing ecological change.

Isadora Romero is a visual storyteller working at the intersection of documentary and artistic photography. Her practice is shaped by a commitment to social and ecological justice, with a focus on agrobiodiversity, food sovereignty, and the relationship between people and land.

The exhibition is curated by Ben Livne Weitzman and Katharina Täschner. Accompanying publications are available from Hartmann Books.

The 2025 jury: Tomáš Dvořák (FAMU, Prague), Zippora Elders (Freelance curator), Boaz Levin (Co-head of program, C/O Berlin), Hinde Haest (Rijksmuseum, Amsterdam), Michelle Henning (University of Liverpool), Maria-Kyveli Mavrokordopoulou (Vrije University Amsterdam), Christiane Riedel (Crespo Foundation), and Katharina Täschner (C/O Berlin).

The 2026 winners: Stelios Kallinikou (1985, Cyprus) and Susanne Kriemann (1972, Germany)  are the winners of the “After Nature . Ulrike Crespo Photography Prize 26”. Their double exhibition will be presented at C/O Berlin from Sep 12, 2026, and at the Crespo Open Space from March 2027.

The Crespo Foundation
Founded by psychologist, photographer, and philanthropist Ulrike Crespo (1950–2019), the foundation is based in Frankfurt am Main and runs, amongst other projects, an artists’ residency in Glenkeen Garden, in West Cork, Ireland. The Crespo Foundation has a dual focus on the social and cultural sectors.