The Making of Battle of Kurukshetra I, Study II, Angkor Wat Temple

Battle of Kurukshetra I, Study II, Angkor Wat Temple, Cambodia. 2020

This image shows a small section of the Battle of Kurukshetra sculpture at Angkor Wat.  The magnificent 48.35 long bas relief panel depicts the pivotal episode of the Mahabharata – and with it the Bhagavad Gita – symbolic of the struggle between good and evil, with a conflict between the sons of Darkness (the Kauravas to our left) and the sons of Light (the Pandavas on the right).

The unequalled artistry of this relief beautifully captures the seething movement and chaos of the battle, from the triumphal march of the soldiers to brutal tussles to moments of utter despair in defeat.

I chose this particular scene because the lone soldier with his shield raised high amongst the chaos spoke to me.  Is he a Kaurava bravely leading the charge into battle, or a Pandava trying to escape being crushed under a careering chariot? I’ll let you decide.

On My Use of Colour

On this occasion, in the depths of the COVID-19 pandemic, I found myself alone at Angkor Wat late one afternoon.  I almost exclusively shoot on black and white film, but due to problems with supply I only had one sheet of large format colour film remaining, so I thought I would experiment with something I had found remarkable previously.

The colour gold, one might think, is made up of yellow and orange hues, but it actually has a large amount of green in it.  At certain times of year, when the conditions are just so, the evening sun reflects off the verdant jungle that surrounds the temple and onto the warm sandstone of the carvings, and it seems to make them glow with a golden light from within.  It is a glorious sight!  I made a long exposure of the scene to capture the full depth and radiance of that glow.

How Strangely We Are Blinded by the Surface of Things

I’m not a fan of colour photography, I find it too literal, it blinds us to hidden depths.  There are exceptions of course, colour photography can be astonishingly beautiful, especially when the colour itself becomes the subject of the image, perhaps in a painterly or abstract fashion.  The work of Ernst Haas and Saul Leiter immediately comes to mind.  But I believe that when I strip away the most obvious layers of reality, such as the colour, I am better able to reveal the poetry of my subject.

For this image, the colour itself lay at the heart of my emotional response to the scene, so I made a black and white print to strip away the all-too-blatant reality, and then hand toned the print with the golden hues that I had experienced that afternoon.  It is a monochrome image, as is my wont, but it is gold and white, not black and white.  With my work I attempt to show you not what a scene looks like, in a literal sense, but what it feels like.

The success of this piece led me to create my Golden Angkor collection, which will be featured in the Golden Goddesses exhibition at the beautiful Plantation Urban Resort & Spa in Phnom Penh, opening May 1st 2025.