My Story

Lucas Varro – Spirit of Angkor

Lucas Varro is a fine art photographer whose life and work are devoted to a singular, timeless subject: the sacred ruins of Angkor.  From his home in Siem Reap, just minutes from the temple complex, he has explored these extraordinary places almost every day for over a decade—chronicling his encounters in a body of work that merges aesthetic mastery with spiritual insight.

Varro’s photographs are not simple records of ancient architecture.  They are quiet meditations—crafted over hours, weeks, and often years—on impermanence, transcendence, and beauty.  Working exclusively with analogue black and white film and using medium and large format cameras, he creates long exposures, sometimes lasting several hours, to capture the delicate interplay of light, time, and stone.  The resulting images possess an ethereal stillness and quiet intensity that transcends documentation.  They are, in every sense, fine art—meticulously composed, technically rigorous, and emotionally resonant.

Each print is an exceptional, limited-edition archival pigment print, hand-crafted to museum standards.  They are collected by connoisseurs of fine art photography and lovers of Angkor alike—those who seek not just an image, but an experience of reverence and connection.

Lucas was born in 1966 and raised on a small hill-farm in England, where his earliest creative instincts were shaped by solitude, storytelling, and a close relationship with the natural world.  At Cambridge, he studied the science of visual perception, before training in fine art in London and spending over two decades apprenticing to traditional master craftsmen.  His path took him across Asia—India, Thailand, Indonesia, Japan—absorbing philosophies and aesthetics that now inform the depth and nuance of his work.  He and his wife, Annie, moved to Cambodia in 2014 to live near the temples that had captured his imagination as a boy.

His creative process is grounded in daily ritual.  He begins with Artist’s Field Notes: observations, poetry, spiritual insights, and chalk or pastel sketches made on-site.  He returns repeatedly to the most inspiring locations, often before dawn or after rain, waiting for moments of transcendent light.  From this devotion emerges a quiet visual language that honours the soul of Angkor.

Lucas draws inspiration from the Japanese philosophy of wabi-sabi—the appreciation of beauty in impermanence, imperfection, and authenticity.  He sees the temples not as ruins, but as living monuments, made more beautiful by time, weather, and decay.  In every fracture of stone and tendril of moss, he finds the sublime.  His images embrace this metamorphosis—not as loss, but as becoming.

With his ongoing Spirit of Angkor series, Lucas offers a poetic invitation: to step beyond time and into the sacred.  His photographs are vessels—for wonder, for memory, for contemplation.  They are tributes to a place, a history, and a way of seeing that honours both the visible and the invisible.