Artist presentation

QT Luong

QT Luong, born to Vietnamese parents in Paris, France, picked up a camera in response to mountaineering in the Alps. When he came for a short stay to the U.S. to conduct A.I. research, he chose U.C. Berkeley because of its proximity to Yosemite. There, he fell in love with the national parks, where his solo wilderness travels included an ascent of Denali. To continue visiting them, he settled in the San Francisco Bay Area and committed to photography full-time. In 2002, he became the first to have photographed each of the (then) fifty-eight U.S. National

Parks with a 5x7-inch large-format camera. His photographs have been widely exhibited in solo shows, including at the USA Pavilion during a

World Expo, and have garnered critical acclaim in major media such as The New York Times (“No one has captured the vast beauty of America’s landscape as comprehensively”), appearing in hundreds of publications worldwide. His best-selling book, Treasured Lands, now in its ninth printing, has earned twelve national and international awards. The only living artist featured in Ken Burns and Dayton Duncan’s The National Parks: America’s Best Idea (2009), he has received the Ansel Adams Award for Photography from the Sierra Club and the Robin W. Winks

Award for Enhancing Public Understanding of National Parks from the National Parks Conservation Association. Luong’s work goes beyond celebrating nature and advocating for conservation, delving into

themes of perception, representation, and the evolving relationship between people and the land. His recent projects examine the dynamic interplay between wilderness and human presence, from national parks to the landscapes near his home in San Jose, CA. Together, these works offer dual reflections on how we shape and are shaped by our environments: while

culture and imagery influence our experience of iconic natural scenes, wildness endures in urban settings, revealing beauty and meaning in the most unexpected places.

Artist statement

After spending a quarter-century photographing the vast, iconic landscapes of America’s national parks, I turned my attention to the landscapes of my city, San Jose, California. This shift mirrors an evolution in environmental thought: from conserving distant wilderness to embracing an inclusive ecology that acknowledges the complex, intertwined relationship between human life and the natural world. Within walking distance of my home, the Coyote Creek Trail a paved path bordered by a narrow strip of nature weaves between developments for twenty miles. Neither remote nor pristine, the trail is not a destination for awe. Yet, through sustained attention, its fragile beauty emerges, awakening a sense of wonder for the wildness in our backyard. Over a decade of returning, I’ve become attuned to changes over time seasonal rhythms, wildlife patterns, and the cycles of drought and flood. These changes also include the transient human presence along the trail. The creek’s watershed was home to the largest homeless encampment in America. Though the Jungle has been cleared, makeshift shelters continue to appear and disappear with little notice. For some, the trail is a place to pass through; for others, it is a home in the most literal sense. However, under new California environmental regulations bolstered by a 2024 U.S. Supreme Court ruling, all remaining encampments along Coyote Creek will be cleared by the end of 2025. As Silicon Valley restores its waterways, photographs of a community’s final days challenge viewers to confront the stark inequalities in one of the world’s most prosperous regions and to consider the moral imperative to protect both people and the environment. This work is a meditation on a place where the boundaries between the wild and the human blur, capturing both natural beauty and the human stories embedded in the landscape. I hope to inspire an awareness of the overlooked both in the delicate patches of nature that persist in our midst and in the precarious lives of those who endure on the margins of society. Moving beyond the distant and untouched, this project embraces the lived-in, the intervened-upon, and the local, revealing the profound connections between people and place. In the Coyote Creek Trail, I have found a small space that reflects universal themes of transformation of nature, of people, and of how we understand our complex place within the land.