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What passes between them is not ours to name—
but it remains.

In the courtyard of Angkor Wat’s second level, beneath the five central towers, two devatas stand side by side, emerging from an unfinished wall as if they had stepped forward from the unseen. Each bears a lotus. Each smile—curved, quiet, knowing—suggests a story long told and still echoing.

They are not guardians. Not dancers.
They are companions.
Their presence is not decorative—it is devotional.

Lucas Varro encountered them at the edge of evening, when the sandstone still shimmered with the day’s last warmth. He worked with large-format black-and-white film, capturing not the detail of their form, but the hush of their exchange. In the darkroom, classical chiaroscuro revealed their depth. Later, the image was hand-toned in gold—not as embellishment, but as offering. A return to the light they once received.

What the Lotus Sisters Know is a rare gesture within the Spirit of Angkor series—an image of playfulness that never loses its gravity. It invites the viewer not into study, but into presence. It does not explain the sacred. It smiles with it.

There are moments the stone remembers.
This is one of them.

Two devatas, hand in light, stand in a silence that laughs. Their gestures are nearly twin, yet not the same. What passes between them is ancient, and golden. The photograph does not record them. It listens.

Captured with large-format black-and-white film and shaped through chiaroscuro, the final image is hand-toned in gold on museum-grade Hahnemühle Bamboo paper. Each print is finished individually—an edition of 25 + 2 Artist’s Proofs, each one its own breath of silence.

To live with this image is to welcome the kind of joy that endures without needing to be spoken.


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