Episode 49 Michael Pierce - ”Shreveport-Bossier: My City, My Community, My Home”

Michael Pierce, Photographer and Founder of the Instagram page @scruffyshabbyshreveport, sits down with Jeffrey Goodman, Director of Marketing and Development for the YMCA of Northwest Louisiana, to answer the following questions:

 

0:32 1. Michael, I only first became aware of you when you tagged the Y on Instagram after taking some absolutely phenomenal photos of the Downtown Y. Your Instagram handle is “Scruffyshabbyshreveport” and you describe your Instagram page as “celebrating Shreveport Louisiana’s beautifully endangered places.”

 

Let’s start here today. The first post I see on your page is dated December 3, 2021. Tell me about the genesis of “Scruffyshabbyshreveport” and how this wonderful project you have been pursuing came about?

 

3:35 2. In just a little more than a year you have built an impressive following. Your Instagram account already has 2188 followers and what I find most remarkable is the community you have built on Instagram who comment on your posts and help you as you document the history of our city.

 

How do you think about building community around your work? And is that important to you?

 

8:42 3. You once said:

 

“There’s beauty in absolutely everything around us. Once we start paying attention to that, you’ll start to see it more and start to appreciate it more.”

 

You seem to be tapping into something people are interested in, even though two of the recurring themes on this podcast have been the amount of apathy that exists in this community as well as the general sense of low self-esteem.

 

Aside from your incredible photos, what do you attribute the success of this project to?

 

15:44 4. One of the things we’ve been grappling with on this podcast and often asking is, who are as a community? What is our identity?

 

When friends of yours who have never been here ask you what Shreveport-Bossier is like, what do you tell them? How do you describe it?

 

18:00 5. What’s the future hold for the “Scruffyshabbyshreveport” project and for Michael Pierce in general?