Southern-born and raised, Brad Arender has set himself apart as a photographic artist by merging new techniques with the organic beauty of candid moments in the world around us. Brad discovered his passion and life’s work with the first roll of film he shot at age nineteen on a Canon AE-1.

During the next eleven years, before reaching age thirty, the self-taught Arender received national recognition via funding and a grant from the National Endowment for the Arts. During the same period, he opened a successful studio/gallery; won the Artist of the Year Award from the NELA Arts Council; co-founded Monroe, Louisiana’s Downtown Gallery Crawl; and led the drive to rename his home’s downtown Second Street “Art Alley,” a burgeoning artists’ colony located in Monroe.

He recently published Welcome Home: Photos from New Orleans Post Hurricanes Katrina and Rita, a collection of the images Arender shot in 2005, only a few months after Katrina.


By combining two aspects of his craft—that of a workaday commercial photographer and a creative artist—Brad Arender has embarked on a time-honored and very American journey, one traveled by photographers like Edward Steichen, Edward Weston, and Dorothea Lange.

Setting out on such a venture is challenging but the goal before Arender is an ever-present inspiration:

My object in living is to unite/my avocation and my vocation. Robert Frost