Petrichor

2018 - 2019

Petrichor is a photographic meditation on existence. It is an attempt to trace the contours of the self through recurring visions: an untamed horse, the dome of a mottled palace marked by time, a silent sea stretching beyond comprehension, and a pathway that leads nowhere yet insists on being followed. These images return to me like fragments of a dream from which I have never fully awakened. By photographing them as they surface from memory and intuition, I confront the questions that have quietly accompanied me for years.

The title refers to the scent that rises from the earth after rain, a presence that is invisible yet unmistakable, born from the meeting of sky and soil. In a similar way, this project emerges from the meeting of time and the body, of memory and the present moment. The photographs inhabit a space where the remembered and the imagined become inseparable.

This work grew out of a prolonged uncertainty about growth and time. I wandered for years within the question “what am I,” aging before I fully understood what that aging meant. I came to realize that the tension between youth and adulthood is not simply about maturity, but about the instability of self-existence. We shed former versions of ourselves, yet they continue to linger within us.

Time does not answer the question of being; it only deepens it. The confusion of living within constant change cannot be resolved by waiting, but by turning inward and confronting the idea of “myself.” In *Petrichor*, the landscape becomes psychological terrain shaped by instinct, memory, silence, and direction without certainty. Together, these elements form not a conclusion, but a constellation of questions.

These images are what rise when time touches the self, ephemeral, elusive, and undeniably real.

Lucien Liu Photography