The Terra Galleria Blog – QT Luong

I’ll be the first to admit that I spent only a couple hours in each of those places. In general I do not spend extended time in cities, but rather travel through them en route to or from National Parks. For instance, I left Acadia National Park at dark on a Sunday, drove to Portland. On Monday morning, I got up at 5.30 and photographed until 8.00 before driving to JFK airport in NYC to catch a flight home in the afternoon.

In the past, I would just pass through cities without any attempt at photography. However, as of late, I have felt more compelled to create images there, and not only for the challenge of working fast in unknown and new places. Those places are part of the experience of many people who live there. As I went through them, they also became part of my experience. Even through a cursory glance, they didn’t look like the cities closer to home, and the difference intrigued me. So I tried to make connections with something that I saw only briefly, without pretending to understand well what I encountered nor making a faithful portrayal. I see that a bit like an equivalent of travel writing: even if travel writers are often not able to spend the time necessary to become intimately familiar with a place, by weaving words together, they would create something interesting out of disparate chance moments and fleeting encounters. My hope is to create a portrait of America, fragmented but nevertheless true to the diversity of the country.