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Rand Fotografie International

Rand Fotografie International

Days to Live: An Aerial Perspective

“Works of art that you can look at like a Rothko or a Pollock.”
PHIL PENMAN

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THE PROVOCATION

What is intelligence, actually?

We are living through the most intensive period of artificial intelligence development in human history. Every major institution on the planet is racing to build minds. The word intelligence has never been more discussed, more funded, more culturally urgent.

Meanwhile, on a frost-prone plateau in New South Wales, a butterfly that has been managing a three-way ecological relationship for three million years is disappearing. In a single river in Queensland, a turtle whose body accumulates the knowledge of one specific river across thirty years is running out of river.

These are not conservation stories. They are intelligence stories.And we are not paying attention.

Ten women woke up one morning carrying these creatures on their faces. Not metaphorically. Overnight — while they slept — the markings of ten critically endangered Australian species appeared on their skin. Nobody knows how. What the ten women did next is what this book is about.

We are building artificial minds while the oldest minds on the planet disappear. The Encoded asks what we lose when that trade goes uncalculated.

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THE BOOK

Three parts.
One argument.

The Encoded is not a photobook with literary accompaniment. It is not a novel with photographs. It is a genuinely hybrid object — three parts, three paper stocks, three relationships to truth — unified by one subject.

PART ONE

The Found-Document Novel

LITERARY FICTION · ~200 PAGES

A complete work of literary fiction structured as archived documents from the Order of the Open Face — Signal thread transcripts, field notebooks, government correspondence, hearing transcripts, personal journals. Ten women. A mysterious institution. The question of what the natural world is actually asking of us.

A reader who never opens Parts Two or Three has read a complete novel. A reader who reads Part Two first reads the same novel differently. Both sequences are designed for.

PART TWO

The Images

FINE ART · ~120 IMAGES

120 images of young women carrying the encoded markings of ten endangered species — produced through creature-specific makeup and large-format Richter-influenced photographic overpainting. Shot on Leica. Printed originally at 1500 × 1500mm.

Full-bleed spreads. One creature per section. No captions. No creature names. The images are not illustrations. They are evidence.

PART THREE

The Correspondences

ECOLOGICAL NON-FICTION · TEN MIRRORS

Ten pages of ecological nonfiction — one per species — followed by ten mirror notes: compressed paragraphs holding the creature's ecological condition and its human parallel in the same breath, without explaining the relationship between them.

Because the relationship is the point. And the point does not require a label.

The cover carries no image. The images are inside. The cover is the door — the typographic statement of what the reader is about to enter.

THE CREATURES

Ten forms of intelligence
the world is losing.

The ten species of the Southern Reckoning were not chosen for their charisma. They were chosen because they are the ones nobody is paying attention to — whose situations are too specific, too ecologically intricate, too far from the conservation mainstream to generate the attention they need. Six of the ten were believed extinct before someone looked more carefully.

CRITICALLY ENDANGERED

Green Carpenter Bee

Iridescent, irreplaceable, capable of a form of pollination no other bee can perform. Ninety-five percent of its habitat was destroyed in the Black Summer fires of 2019–20. The jewel of its ecosystem, nearly burned.

Brilliance without the ecosystem that sustains it is not brilliance. It is a performance of brilliance in a landscape that is quietly running out of the conditions the performance requires.

VULNERABLE

Richmond Birdwing Butterfly

Australia's largest subtropical butterfly, dying by confusion — drawn to lay its eggs on an introduced vine that mimics its native host but is toxic to its larvae. It cannot distinguish, by instinct alone, between what nourishes and what kills.

Knowing a thing and being free of it turn out to share almost no territory at all. The encoding did not give her new information. It gave her the same information running through her body rather than her mind.

CRITICALLY ENDANGERED

Mary River Turtle

Found nowhere else on Earth. Takes thirty years to reach reproductive maturity. Grows algae on its head like a living crown accumulated over decades. Was sold by the thousands as a disposable pet before anyone understood what it was.

The thirty years before the turtle is ready are not waiting. They are the becoming. And the becoming is the point. Patience is not what you practise while the real thing begins.

CRITICALLY ENDANGERED

Lord Howe Island Phasmid

Declared extinct in 1920. Found alive in 2001 — twenty-four individuals on a volcanic sea stack. Melbourne Zoo has since bred more than 14,000 nymphs. Eggs have been found in the wild on Blackburn Island. Natural reproduction, in a restored habitat.

Persistence is not the same as resilience. Resilience implies bounceback. Persistence is the refusal to stop existing even when everything has conspired toward extinction. Which is a different and sturdier thing.

CRITICALLY ENDANGERED

Golden Sun Moth

Spends twenty-five years underground as a larva before emerging as an adult with no mouth. The entire brief surface existence devoted to one act of continuation. Less than 1% of native temperate grasslands remain.

The encoding asked one question of the startup founder who carried it: what continuation are you actually serving? The moth burns through everything it has. That is not a template. It is a tragedy the encoding is asking her to understand, not repeat.

CRITICALLY ENDANGERED

Victorian Grassland Earless Dragon

Found nowhere else on Earth. Takes thirty years to reach reproductive maturity. Grows algae on its head like a living crown accumulated over decades. Was sold by the thousands as a disposable pet before anyone understood what it was.

The thirty years before the turtle is ready are not waiting. They are the becoming. And the becoming is the point. Patience is not what you practise while the real thing begins.

CRITICALLY ENDANGERED

Western Swamp Tortoise

Australia’s most endangered reptile. Ancestry stretching back fifteen million years. Aestivates for seven months of every year - retreating underground, slowing its metabolism to almost nothing, conserving everything it has until the right season returns.

The creature does not resist the hostile season. It becomes still and waits for the season that can sustain it. The aestivation is not the point. The emergence is.

ENDANGERED

Bathurst Copper Butterfly

Cannot survive without three things simultaneously: a specific plant, a specific ant, and the specific frost-prone terrain of the Central Tablelands. Three million years of refining a three-way ecological relationship. Remove any element and the butterfly is gone.

The ideology of self-sufficiency is not a philosophy. It is a failure to observe what has actually been working. The most extraordinary beings are often those whose survival is predicated on relationship.

ENDANGERED

Blue Mountains Water Skink

Exists only in highland peat swamps — ancient landscapes that form over thousands of years. The indicator species: when the peat swamp is healthy, the skink persists. When the swamp degrades, the skink vanishes. Its body is the swamp's own report on its health.

Truth in the body and truth in the data are not two versions of the same thing. They are the same thing, arrived at by different routes. The work of a life is to find the form that holds both without losing either.

ENDANGERED

Pygmy Blue-Tongue Skink

Believed extinct for thirty-three years. Found in 1992 inside the stomach of a dead brown snake. Lives in abandoned spider burrows in agricultural grassland that everyone had written off. Invisible not because absent — because no one knew how to look.

The question was never whether the thing worth finding was there. It was whether anyone would come looking with enough patience and humility to discover it.

THE ARTIST

BASED

Rushcutters Bay, Sydney

EQUIPMENT

Leica — exclusively

RECOGNITION

Prix de la Photographie, Paris — Multiple professional awards including Gold, Bronze, Honorary Mention

SUBSTRATE

Hahnemühle Photo Rag Baryta · 1500 × 1500mm

WRITING

Days to Live: An Aerial Perspective

Radical Intelligence

WEB

randfotografie.international

Rand
Leeb-du Toit

Rand Leeb-du Toit is a Sydney-based fine art photographer, painter, and interdisciplinary artist whose practice sits at the intersection of ecological intelligence, embodied knowledge, and the long history of looking carefully at things the world has given up on.

He shoots exclusively with Leica cameras and prints at large format on archival substrates. His portrait Worlds Within received an Honorary Mention at the Prix de la Photographie, Paris — the central visual gesture of that image, replacing the face with a celestial orb, directly informed the orb motif that runs through The Encoded as its only recurring mark.

His professional history spans AI research, technology leadership, venture capital, law, and published authorship. This cross-disciplinary foundation is not incidental to the project — it is the project's intellectual spine. The person who once built models for the future is now writing fiction and making images about what the future is destroying.

RADICAL INTELLIGENCE — THE PHILOSOPHICAL FRAMEWORK

Intelligence is not a human invention approaching its apex in large language models. It is an ancient, distributed, ecological phenomenon of which human intelligence and artificial intelligence are both late and partial expressions. The living world has been refining intelligence for longer than our species has existed. The Encoded is the argument that we should notice this before it is too late to notice.

LATEST

From the project

UPDATE - MARKETING

Article posted on Substack, 23 April 2026

She Was Encoded in the Night

She carries something that arrived in the night. She did not ask for it. She does not yet know — not fully, not in language — what it is asking of her.

The marks on her face appeared while she slept. They are not tattoos, not paint, not the residue of a dream she will forget by morning. They are the encoding of a creature — a specific creature, in a specific place, in a specific and urgent ecological situation — written onto her face by something that needed a face. Something that has been trying to be seen for a very long time. Something that chose this moment, and this face, because other methods have not been working.

In the last two posts I asked a question and then left it open. In The Code Beneath the Skin I wrote about the intelligence we have been ignoring while we race to build artificial ones. In The Body Was Always a Page I wrote about marks not human in origin, about the face carrying the condition of something that has no face of its own and needs one. I asked you to look at the face in that image and ask yourself who wrote it.

This is the answer. And this is the beginning of what I have spent the past year building toward.

The natural world is not sending data. It is not publishing reports. It has encoded itself onto the faces of ten young women and is asking them — and us — to pay attention in a different way entirely.

Let me introduce you to The Encoded. It is both a fine art photography series and a book in three parts. Ten critically endangered Australian species. Ten women who carry their markings overnight. The Lord Howe Island Phasmid, believed extinct for eighty years before twenty-four survivors were found on a sea stack in the Tasman Ocean. The Mary River Turtle, who takes thirty years to be ready and grows algae on her head like a living crown. The Bathurst Copper Butterfly, managing a three-way ecological relationship for three million years. The Golden Sun Moth, spending twenty-five years underground before emerging with no mouth. Ten creatures. Ten forms of intelligence the world is in the process of losing while we direct our wonder elsewhere.

The images are made exclusively with high end Leica cameras and Profoto lighting. The encodings are realised through creature-specific makeup and large-format photographic overpainting in the tradition of Gerhard Richter — the photograph as ground for a painted surface, the two registers inseparable in the final work. The prints are 1500 by 1500 millimetres on Hahnemühle Photo Rag Baryta. At that scale they are not images you walk past. They are presences.

The book is in three parts: firstly, a complete 200-page found-document novel, secondly, 120 images, and thirdly, 10 pages of ecological nonfiction. It’s not a photobook with literary accompaniment. It’s not a novel with photographs. It’s a single argument made in three registers — fictional, visual, scientific — about what intelligence is, what we are losing, and what it would mean to pay attention before the losing is complete.

The woman in this image carries the Lord Howe Island Phasmid. She does not yet know everything the encoding is asking of her. Neither do I, not in full. But I know what it has asked of the past year — the shoots, the overpainting that is beginning, the novel that has been written alongside the images, the ecological research that has changed how I understand every creature in the series. It has asked for the kind of attention you give to something when you understand that it might not be there much longer.

That quality of attention is what The Encoded is made of. And it is what I am asking for in return.

:: Rand

PRESS & MEDIA

For press enquiries, image requests, and review copies contact:

randal.leebdutoit@gmail.com

Download press kit (available at campaign launch)

Copyright, Rand Leeb-du Toit 2026