Rain-Chant at the Eastern Gate
Night’s last echo drains away, leaving only the measured drip of rain from apsara crowns. Root and wall share one damp heartbeat; my own joins them. Film waits, cool and receptive as river stone beneath water. I wait, too, until breath thins and the hush becomes articulate. Then exposure—slow, unhurried—lets mist engrave its pale signature across the negative. Hand-toning will later kindle a muted glow, fragile as incense smoke rising from a ruined altar.
wet root, broken wall—
each keeps the other from falling
into its own hush
Also in Library
The Stone Is Not the World
A contemplative Angkor essay on how surviving stone has shaped the way Angkor is seen — and why the vanished world of wood, water, labour, smoke, roads, bodies, weather, and devotion must be allowed to return around the temples in What the Stone Hides.
The Consolation of Not Being Separate
There are moments when the world refuses to become personal. The rain falls on the day you needed sun. The illness does not pause because someone is loved. The sea does not soften because a child is afraid. And when the thing prayed against happens anyway, it can feel as if the world has abandoned us. But perhaps what has failed is not the world’s care. Perhaps what has failed is our idea of care.
The Face That Looks Four Ways
The faces of the Bayon have been called Brahma, Lokeshvara, Jayavarman VII, and Vajrasattva. This essay examines the evidence behind each theory and argues that their deepest meaning may lie in a royal-Buddhist synthesis: compassion given the scale of empire.
$895
Ta Prohm Temple, Angkor, Cambodia — 2020
Limited Edition Archival Pigment Print
Edition
Strictly limited to 7 prints + 2 Artist’s Proofs
Edition Number
This listing is for the first numbered print from the Large Collector Edition: 1/7
Medium
Hand-toned black-and-white archival pigment print on Hahnemühle Bamboo — a museum-grade fine art paper chosen for its quiet tactility and reverent depth, echoing the spirit of the temples.
Signature & Numbering
Each print is individually signed and numbered by the artist on the border (recto)
Certificate of Authenticity
Accompanies every print
Image Size
28 x 28 inches (71.1 x 71.1 cm)
Mist still clings to the crumbling gate when the first breath of dawn slides between trees, lighting the spung’s vast roots like slow-moving water turned to wood. Stone and bark share one pulse; silence settles over their entwined bodies as though the jungle itself were praying.
Standing alone in that pale hush, Lucas Varro felt the temple inhale his presence, then exhale memory back through dripping leaves. Each droplet, each moss-soft contour became a syllable in an unspoken mantra the camera was called to receive.
Medium-format black-and-white film opened for the length of a whispered prayer, letting shadow unfold its depths. Weeks later, under darkroom glow, chiaroscuro revealed the subtle topography of moist stone. Gold hand-toning lent warmth to the midtones, creating a print that seems to breathe when light falls across it.
Strictly limited to twenty-five prints with two artist’s proofs, each 8 × 8 inch impression is signed on the border recto and born on sustainable Hahnemühle Bamboo paper—its gentle fibres echoing the living grain of root and wall.
Welcome this stillness; let it gather its hush in the quiet heart of your space.
Click here to walk deeper into the dawn-lit silence of the Artist’s Journal.