The Light That Became Remembering
The light was not fading.
It was remembering.
Evening gathered along the courtyard wall of Angkor Wat’s second level, as if reluctant to leave what it had once touched. Beneath the five central towers, the day’s final breath hovered. The jungle exhaled. Shadows softened. And before me—without motion, without sound—stood two devatas, carved not into stone, but into time.
They were nearly identical. Their lotus blossoms lifted in offering, their three-pointed crowns rising like memory. One reached across to rest her hand upon the other’s shoulder. It was not a gesture of possession, but of return. As though something given long ago was being received again.
Behind them, the wall remained unfinished—flat, silent, bare. And yet from that blankness, they had emerged, complete. Their presence felt less sculpted than summoned. Light did not strike them—it settled into them.
I stood in silence. The tripod was already placed. The film waited. I no longer did.
When the shutter opened, I did not think of the photograph. I thought of the moment—the exact stillness in which offering and remembrance become the same act.
What came to me later, in the darkroom, was not the exposure. It was the echo. The hand that touched the shoulder. The gaze that didn’t turn. The gold that didn’t shine—but stayed.
gold dusk in the court—
their hands remember the light
long after it leaves
Also in Library
Stone That Remembers the Sky
This poem listens to Angkor not as ruin, but as grammar—where moss, shadow, and proportion carry devotion forward without spectacle. What endures here is not glory, but measure: a way of standing that no longer needs witnesses.
Rice-Ghost and the Seven Drums
At harvest, the danger is not hunger but forgetting how to listen.
This folklore retelling speaks of drums struck for silence, of grain taken without gratitude, and of a narrow figure who does not punish—only waits. A tale of pacts made not with spirits, but with attention itself.
Naga Vow
A lost city sleeps in the jungle, its thresholds carved with serpents — not ornament, but law. This vow-poem enters love as sacred hunger: desire as guardianship, devotion as possession, the body speaking without language. A liturgy of heat, roots, rain, and the terrible tenderness of being claimed.
$250
Angkor Wat Temple, Angkor, Cambodia — 2020
Limited Edition Archival Pigment Print
Edition
Strictly limited to 25 prints + 2 Artist’s Proofs
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
9.5 x 6.8 inches (24.1 x 17.3 cm)
At the threshold where light becomes memory, two devatas emerge from stone—graceful, entwined, and radiant in their stillness. This is not a moment captured, but one consecrated.
Carved high upon the unfinished sandstone of Angkor Wat’s second-level courtyard, the figures appear almost identical—twin sisters or mirrored selves—each lifting a lotus blossom in quiet offering. One reaches across to rest her hand upon the other’s shoulder, their embrace suspended in golden silence. The air was thick with the hush of evening, as if the day itself were bowing.
Lucas Varro waited for the light to find them. Using large-format black-and-white film, he made this image beneath the sun’s last breath. In the studio, the negative was shaped through chiaroscuro and hand-toned in gold—an act of reverence, not effect. Each print is unique, bearing the subtle fire of what the stone once held.
This museum-grade archival pigment print on Hahnemühle Bamboo paper is offered in a strictly Limited Edition of 25 + 2 AP.
No two impressions are alike. Each carries the light that stayed.
Click here to walk deeper into the artist’s journal—where silence remembers the offering.
