Waitress turned photographer to showcase photography at Café Du Luxe in Denton

by Marty Sabota of Lightning Bear Productions

When her first opportunity arose to take a photography class her junior year in high school, Emily Penn leaped at the chance to delve into her longtime passion.

There, a photography teacher saw real promise and mentored the teenager and her penchant for camera work.

When Penn graduated in 2008 from the University of North Texas with a visual arts degree, she immediately hoped to share her photographic collection with the world. Her opportunities to showcase her art were limited, however. She waits tables in a Denton restaurant and in a Lewisville restaurant.

But her work has found a home on the walls of Café Du Luxe in Denton. An entire wall of the café is dedicated solely for featuring some of the Greater Dallas-Fort Worth area’s brightest and most exciting artists.

“It’s a really nice venue for hanging my art,” said Penn, 22, referring to the large wall space.

Featured art will be displayed monthly with a "meet the artist" night on the third Sunday evening of the month. Penn was selected as the November artist. Three other artists have had monthly showings: J. Lynn Kelly, Scott Focke, and Joan Hart. Penn is the first to showcase her talents through photography.

Penn said she has always been interested in the visual, partly due to her interest in her father’s job as an architect. It was an easy transition to photography.

“The mind has the freedom to pick and perceive reality in its own way,” Penn said. “A camera, however, interprets spatial reality and records it as a two-dimensional image resembling the actual location.

“An unaltered photograph represents a single point perspective of a space while the human eye can observe the same space and create a three-dimensional manifestation in the mind.”

Through her photographs, Penn said, she is reconciling the difference between her personal memories and a camera’s visual memory.

One of her recent series is My Mind’s Eye, is a visual interpretation of memories of specific locations that Penn frequently visits or notices.

“Even though I am a photographer, my memories do not resemble photographs,” Penn said. “My objective, in visually communicating my memories, is influenced by certain aspects of cubism such as the reconstruction of a subject from more than one perspective.”

In My Mind’s Eye, Penn said she uses the computer as an instrument to merge photographs from various angles “to allow a two-dimensional medium, such as photography, to represent multiple vantage points.” These were created through PhotoShop manipulation.