Aux Yeux des Dieux - Sydney

Dear Reader, the trip about the concept behind these photos is in the short story below. What is helping to create these photos and the effects is not anything in front of the brilliant Leica lens at all, but something I've invented called 'The Zeus Device', of which there is only one in the entire world. The Zeus Device doesn't work for every concept, but for the light distances and apertures here (and in the 'Les Orgasmes de Ben Buckler" pieces) it works a treat. At any rate, I hope you get into the vibe of the yarn. There are some very dark pieces in this series, yet such is the nature of The Furies. 

Anyway, in this selection of Aux Yeux des Dieux you're seeing our world as it is seen by The Furies.  If you're not up to speed on The Furies, spend a few moments elsewhere getting the salient points and then rip in xS x

"Escaping from Aeschylus’ Orestia’ and Sophocles ‘Oedipus at Colonus’, the Furies (or Erinyes) and their inescapable karmic justice arrive in Sydney, the self-proclaimed Emerald City. Sydney viewed through the divine eyes of The Furies, named Alecto, Megaera and Tisiphone. Not watchers of this world, but judges within it. 

The images are witness to it. 

Through our human eyes, in these images of the same time and place, we suddenly to see through their eyes. 

Light itself is no longer just illumination, but illumination as we see through their eyes is moral atmosphere. Light is just moral heat, not brightness. Wrongdoing radiates into form, guilt glows as embers in ash, the souls of the innocents are shadow soft light, muted from view of The Furies.

Shadows gather around the places where crimes have occurred. Even in full sunlight, buildings and places turn dusk-dark, shaded by hidden atrocities. Darkness through the eye of these Gods, making forms left by the presences of unresolved guilt in people, darkness gathering where crimes have occurred, tilting towards the palette of decay towards blackened rust, dried-blood brown, and corpse-pale whites. Beauty is fragility, rot sparkles as vivid effervescence, the signs from insurance firms glister, flowers are soft grey, bloodstain pulse with saturated colour. The lights of The Furies accuse in sudden flares: Alecto as a violent as a storm’s flicker; Megaera sharpens light and cuts it into contrasts; opposing Tisiphone whose fury can congeal light from softest tint into a thick molasses of blood dark tones. Silent, effortless and total, banishing all from their Fury so that naught but guilt remains. What we see left behind is submerged in a moral x-ray, even space becomes heavy, every face weighted with history, every act leaving a luminous residue as a target, laser-lit for The Furies’ vengeance.

Flying at the speed of light, The Furies wouldn’t ask of their eyes “Is this bright or dark?” But rather, “Who hear deserves to suffer?” Erinyes are not neutral observers, but embodiments of divine retribution. As with light, once The Furies have arrived in the once Emerald City that is Sydney, sound no longer travels cleanly. The undertones of the city’s liars speech drag with a faint whisper beneath it, like another mouth speaking half a second late. Those with clean hearts upon hearing them can no longer be fooled. On stained ground where money earned from exploiting others from heaped and spiralling taxation, upon those paths where first home mortgagees are forced to prop up the economy for those who own a quiver of properties; their very footsteps leave  auditory afterimages—soft repetitions trailing behind, so even if they dress down they cannot move without being identified.  

In places of financial violence, silence hums, like pressure inside the skull. The Furies command that silence is never empty. 

To human ears, this feels like constant tinnitus mixed with distant murmuring—never loud enough to identify, never quiet enough to escape, never able to sleep soundly for fear of violence. Depth Perception is a Moral Distance, Not a Physical one. Distance and a sense of near and far in these visions are replaced by deservedness. Paths toward confession or punishment feel short, almost folded as space warps, based on ethical gravity entriely. Vertigo is induced by wrong intentions, not from height. 

As with light and form, The Furies don’t experience time as a straight line. Past crimes hover over the present, recent violence feels thick, slow, syrupy and long-unavenged wrongs feel cold and compressed, like ancient fossils pressing outward. Politicians past and present walk and simultaneously, all can glimpse ghost-images of what she and he did decades ago, playing faintly inside their outlines. Their guilt smelling of rusting coins, betrayal’s sweetness like the first rot of flesh, blood spilled still lingers and clean water fouled if held in the light of corrupt hands.

The Furies dissociate all from what was Sydney’s ordinary reality. Among the hedonists, the publicists, the egotists and marketing classes, with a moment they fall prey to having difficulty recognising beauty without suspicion. They become obsessively aware of moral imbalances they have inflicted upon the lives of others, pressing upon them. All Sydneysiders eventually stop perceiving people as individuals and start perceiving them as sentences awaiting execution.  

And The Furies come have gone in a camera shutter's single click."