The Light That Stepped into Stillness
To lift one foot in light is to begin a prayer.
Ta Prohm reveals its secrets softly. Carvings half-veiled by vines. Echoes beneath the canopy. It was near dusk when Lucas Varro noticed a small medallion embedded in the sandstone—so subtle it might have gone unseen.
Within it, a deer raised one hoof inside a circle of carved foliage. The gesture was precise, poised—not frozen, but eternally unfolding. For a few golden minutes, the jungle light touched the stone as if in communion. The image does not depict movement, but remembers it.
That remembrance forms the heart of When the Deer Danced the Sun Down.
Captured on medium format black-and-white film in 2021, the photograph was shaped using classical chiaroscuro to invite emotional depth and visual stillness. The final print is hand-toned in gold—honouring the molten hush of dusk that had illuminated the deer not with spectacle, but with grace.
Printed on museum-grade Hahnemühle Bamboo paper, the work is available in a signed and numbered edition of 25 + 2 Artist’s Proofs. Each piece is not merely a document of sacred ruin, but a devotional artefact—where light becomes a gesture, and stillness becomes breath.
To those who receive it, the image offers more than an aesthetic encounter. It offers a quiet threshold—into time remembered, light received, and prayer in the form of a single raised hoof.
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 — 2021
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)
A deer, encircled by stone leaves, raises one hoof into light that feels both remembered and newly born. When the Deer Danced the Sun Down captures a moment not of action, but of invocation—a gesture held in silence that seemed to draw dusk from the sky.
At Ta Prohm Temple, as the Cambodian sun vanished behind the jungle canopy, a sandstone medallion shimmered with sudden presence. The deer appeared to glow from within, its curved form receiving light as breath, not surface. The image evokes sacred circularity—motion paused in eternity.
Captured on medium format black-and-white film with long exposure, the photograph was later shaped using classical chiaroscuro techniques to reveal its quiet gravity. Each print is hand-toned in gold, echoing the molten warmth of that sacred dusk.
Printed on museum-grade Hahnemühle Bamboo paper, this archival pigment print is signed and numbered in a strictly limited edition of 25 + 2 Artist’s Proofs.
Let it offer stillness—the kind that glows in the corner of your room long after the sun has gone.
Click here to enter the Artist’s Journal and step deeper into the hush behind the light.