More information about Quang-Tuan Luong
Here are answers to questions frequently asked by students preparing reports.
Where & when were you born?
Paris, 1964.
Do you have any brothers and sisters?
I am only child, but other people exist too :-)
Where did you go to school?
I was educated in Paris, attending the following institutions:
Lycee Louis-le-Grand for high school and college,
Ecole Polytechnique for college/master,
University of Paris at Orsay for PhD.
What did you enjoy doing as a child?
I read a lot of serious books, built models, played chess, and collected stamps and postcards.
I had little interest in social or athletic activities (besides a bit of table tennis and tennis),
and none for team sports.
What made you become interested in photography?
My father was a rather serious photographer and taught me the
essentials. I won a photo contest (and a camera) around the age of
12. However, it was not before I started climbing mountains that this
interest took up in earnest. This was such a new world for me that I
wanted to bring some of the beauty back with me and show to others.
Where did you study (photography) ?
I am self taught, like most other photographers.
Were there any photographers that affected your work?
I first realized that the type of mountain photography I was doing could be
elevated to an art form through the words and images of Galen Rowell.
Eliot Porter showed me how to see subtle colors and patterns in the complexity of nature.
When I took up large format landscape photography, I was much inspired by David Muench choice
of subjects and approaches.
I still consider them to be the masters of adventure, color nature, and landscape photography, respectively.
Where did you work after studying?
Before becoming a free lance, full-time photographer,
I worked for more than a decade as a computer scientist (at UC
Berkeley and SRI International) rather than a photographer, although
my field of research was image understanding, which ties up with some
of the technical aspects of photography.