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.

* Prints from the Petrichor series were created using the Bromoil process.

Lucien Liu Photography