Born to Vietnamese parents in Paris, France, QT Luong's experience of mountaineering in the Alps led him to pick up a camera. When he came for a short stay to the U.S. in order to conduct research in the fields of Artificial Intelligence and Image Processing, he chose U.C. Berkeley because of its close proximity to Yosemite -- a destination he had heard about from other climbers.
There, he fell in love with the national parks, where his solo wilderness travels included an ascent of Denali. In order to continue visiting them, he settled in the San Francisco Bay Area and subsequently left his career as a scientist to work as a photographer. In 2002, he became the first to have photographed each of the (then) 58 U.S. National Parks with a 5x7 camera. In 2009, Ken Burns and Dayton Duncan featured him as the only living artist in their film The National Parks: America's Best Idea. He received the Robin W. Winks Award for Enhancing Public Understanding of National Parks from the National Parks Conservation Association in 2021 and the Ansel Adams Award for Photography from the Sierra Club in 2022.
His work has been profiled and critically acclaimed in The New York Times ("No one has captured the vast beauty of America’s landscape as comprehensively"), Chicago Tribune, San Francisco Chronicle, National Geographic Explorer among many other newspapers, magazines, and other media. His photographs are the subject of five books, including
Treasured Lands
and
Our National Monuments,
winners of eighteen combined national and international awards, and have appeared in hundreds of publications worldwide. Luong's prints, widely collected, have been exhibited solo in museums and galleries nationwide and abroad.
He lives with his family in San Jose, California.
Phone: +1 408-706-0894