It must be one happy Tuesday over at the Fort Worth Star-Telegram. First, Heather Landy was named a finalist for the prestigious 2007 Gerald Loeb Awards for Distinguished Business and Financial Journalism, for her story "Radio Shack CEO's Resume in Question.” And now comes word that arts writer and critic Andrew Marton has been named a winner in the Arts & Entertainment category of the equally wowza 2007 Missouri Lifestyle Journalism Awards, awarded by the Missouri School of Journalism. It's for his piece "Avedon's Lone Stars," about which the judges wrote:
Detective story. Local story. National story. This piece has it all. The writer uncovers the whereabouts of some of Richard Avendon's "In the American West" photographic series. The iconic photographs illustrate much about their subjects, but this approach reveals even more. It prints the famous Avedon photos that show the series' Texans, then takes new photos 20 years later. (The new photos, by the way, compare favorably to the old ones.) Then the writer asks about the circumstances of the original photo shoot, digging out not only the logistics but also what the subjects were thinking. In many cases, the information per se is not enthralling but the overall impact, as Marton's introduction says, tells us how these "homegrown miners and farmers and factory workers whose lives, unglamorous by every other measure, were illuminated, touched and irreversibly changed by a chance encounter with a New Yorker and his camera."So, mazel tov, Mr. Marton. Spend your thou wisely, and give my pal and ours Chris Kelly that lead crystal vase trophy. He deserves something, damn it. --Robert Wilonsky