A close call always puts things in perspective. While I have a few like the next person, nothing shook me more to my core than almost losing my son.  The February day started fine enough with me and my wife going out to bring take out food home, but then I received a call that made me skip a beat. Driving back home I did not know how to interpret the words “He’s not responding”. I wanted to lose it but tried to hold it.

As we arrived, I saw my son’s face. My son’s smile can brighten your day, but this time there was no smile…. he was gloomy, turning blue. He looked as if he was having his life pulled out of him. When the paramedics came he was still unresponsive but breathing, he had a seizure that could have turned sour. I picked up my camera and rode in the ambulance. Without my camera in hand, I would probably gone nuts.

As I was taking some photographs of my son in the hospital, these words came to mind: “God forbid if I were to lose him, the only thing I would be left with would be photographs”. Indeed a close call puts things in perspective. I was always a documentary photographer at heart, telling stories with photographs, but that event solidified the calling that I have been living up to that point.

Photography to some is a job, to others it’s cameras. To me it’s in my soul. I always have my camera with me and have a passion for telling stories through photographs. Life is a story, life is precious. Life is a documentary and I try to capture it.

My quest is to try to capture not only aesthetically pleasing photographs, but above all photographs that have soul and timelessness to them….I’m after photographs that strike a chord in the inner most being because I believe that photography is more than pictures, it’s about Life.

My name is Olivier Duong, a Haitian-French-Vietnamese photographer living in Fort Lauderdale, Florida.