Photographer provides a different perspective to familiar places

Artist Melanie Parent was afraid to step out of her front door, afraid to see what lay beyond her driveway, what was happening down her road. She struggled with fear and anxiety and barely left her house for several years. Her husband gave her a camera and with it came the courage to use her art to reframe the world of her Northwest Louisiana home in a way that she hopes will help others see this part of the world differently – warmly and more honestly. On Thursday, July 12, from 5 to 8 p.m., Parent invites you to join her at artspace at 708 Texas St. in downtown Shreveport for the opening of “A Distance Nearer Home.”

Academy Award-winning animation director William Joyce is a collector of Parent’s work. Joyce says, “Mellie Parent’s photography beautifully captures a vanishing part of Louisiana and its culture. The cotton fields, the small towns, the ramshackle field houses, the once-grand mansions are made wondrous and haunting by her camera. She does not sentimentalize the past. Her work is lyrical but honest, blunt, truthful. I think her work will have a lasting impact on how we remember our past. I think she is an important new voice in photography.”

“I hope that through my photographs— whether of a solitary lady on an empty rural grocery aisle or of a storefront taken through my rain-soaked camera lens—people will be drawn in,” said Parent. “I want to evoke a sense of nostalgia and longing for something forgotten and precious through what I capture with my camera,” she adds.

Enjoy the opening and show at artspace at 708 Texas St. in downtown Shreveport. Thursday, July 12, from 5 to 8 p.m. Free and open to the public.