The Making of The Last Light of Kurukshetra, Angkor Wat Temple

The Last Light of Kurukshetra, Angkor Wat Temple, Cambodia — 2020

A hush had settled across the western gallery as if the stone itself were holding its breath. The last rays of the sun, burnished and low, glanced through the ancient columns and touched the wall with a light that did not fall but rose—from within the sandstone, as though the reliefs remembered the fire of their own making.

Before me: the battle. Chaos chiseled into silence. A galloping horse rears above a tangle of limbs and shields, yet nothing moves. The warriors, caught forever mid-charge or in the arc of their final gesture, seem less like the conquered and the conquerors than the visible dreaming of some deeper current—an eternal conflict beneath time. One figure stands out: a lone soldier, shield raised, neither fleeing nor triumphant. I could not decide if he was about to fall or break through. Perhaps both.

The light was difficult, diffuse yet glowing, with an uncanny green-gold cast, as if filtered through the canopy of centuries. I did not frame or compose so much as listen. The image came not with precision but with surrender. I waited, then made the exposure slowly, letting the long breath of time settle into the film.

Later, in the quiet of the darkroom, I returned not to the facts of what I had seen, but to the feeling—the weight of stone, the ache of myth, the glow that came not from the sun but from something older. I shaped the final print by hand, not in black and white, but in the gold and ash of memory, letting the toning seep into the paper like lichen across old walls. It is not the colour of war, but of what war leaves behind: dust, silence, a question unanswered in light.

— L.V.