The Supreme Growth

REALISED; RELEASED

ARTIFICIAL INTELLIGENCE, 2011

Edition of 50, 40 pages, 19 x 26 cm, digital offset print

$AU30 at www.leonbatchelor.com

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God of light and truth, Apollo is the photographer par excellence. We might picture him skirting the clouds, shooting from the hip, repurposing light and bestowing his immortal truths to the awe-struck suppliants below. All photographers are Apollonians by trade. They set aside the flux of the material world as though it need only exist hypothetically, in service of.

Though Apollo’s voice has long been silenced, lost in the banter of his many emissaries. The camera is the most prolific of these and fiercely it has undertaken to enclose the world in a photographic circumference. Without obstruction or warning the epic bidimensional plane gathers the world into its symbolic triumph. It goes unnoticed that the photograph, like the furnace and the laboratory, infiltrates the material substrate of what surrounds us. The ensuing struggle to locate where the artificial gives way to the natural ends in apparent failure, having only turned up endless forms of artificiality. Not without this great sacrifice does the camera goad the world into imagery and the beauty of mere appearance.

To delight endlessly in the divinatory apparatus of the camera is to inevitably terminate its grace. We suddenly look upwards into the light and find only an irresolvable glare. The Apollonian is then put upon to seek out the cause of this terminus but will only cast his eyes sideways in suspicion of the actual. This movement sideways into the mortal world brings with it a challenge to the photograph – that it is merely artifice. As if destined towards this final obstacle, the modal axes of the camera disclose a conflict of this very nature. For if the ‘portrait’ is to portray then the horizontal aperture must involve itself in something else. It resists the allegorical might of the portrait, gesturing upwards into theory, divination and eternity. Rather the ‘landscape’ looks anxiously about the horizon, resisting apotheoses.

So the Apollonian presses on, a man with a hammer to which everything looks like a nail. His frenetic use of the camera to pulverise all that is into two meagre axes habituates us to the photograph’s prosaic consciousness, its Artificial Intelligence. Though don’t we still look timidly through the lens – into what? “Shall truth in truth’s own temple be denied?” [1]

1. Euripides, Ion, trans. Gilbert Murray 1954 [366]