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Artist’s Field Journal

Shadow and Stone
Ta Prohm Temple, Angkor – Spirit of Angkor Series
Black-and-white film, hand-toned archival pigment print

The shadows came first—cool, vast, and breathing.  Before even the first light of dawn crept in through the broken lintels, they were already there: waiting.  They gathered like memory along the corridor walls, veiling the stone in silence, folding time into texture.

I stepped softly into the gallery as one might step into a dream half-remembered.  Each pillar stood like a monk in meditation, cloaked in shadow, carved with time.  Light arrived slowly—tentatively—touching the edges of stone, revealing not form, but feeling.

This is where the visible gives way to the invisible.  Where shadow does not obscure, but reveals—through absence, through hush.  Photographing here is not about seeing more, but seeing less… and in that less, discovering what endures.

The exposure was long, as was the stillness I kept.  The lens gathered shadow like water into a vessel, and only then, when stone had revealed its inner hush, did light begin to speak.

 

shadow enters first
stone listens without answer—
stillness opening

—

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