Deondra Scott, a shy, even timid, 18-year-old from Montgomery, Ala., photographs the people closest to her. While it’s easy to get her neighbors to relax around her, there’s another reason Ms. Scott chooses to document her poor, African-American neighborhood. She does not want to forget.
“I want to get out of here, but I want to remember where I came from, too,” she said.
Ms. Scott is in New York City this week, scheduled to appear on stage at Carnegie Hall on Thursday in the 2009 Scholastic Art and Writing National Awards Ceremony. Her neighbors — or at least their photographs — will be there, too, because Ms. Scott’s portfolio has earned a gold medal and a $10,000 cash award.
A recent graduate from Booker T. Washington Magnet High School in Montgomery, Ms. Scott has studied photography for three years and prints her own photographs. She lives with her grandmother, Jimmie Lee Scott; is active in her church; tutors young children and works in a discount store. She will be attending the University of Alabama in Birmingham in the fall, where she plans to study biomedical engineering.
The awards were begun 86 years ago by Maurice R. Robinson, the founder of Scholastic, the children’s publishing company. Although the awards are now administered by the nonprofit Alliance for Young Artists and Writers, Scholastic remains the largest sponsor. (The New York Times is also a sponsor.) Among the notable people recognized when they were in high school are Richard Avedon, Robert Redford, Truman Capote, John Lithgow, Andy Warhol, Sylvia Plath, Zac Posen, Philip Pearlstein, Tom Otterness and Robert Indiana.
“The defining moment of my life was when I was seventeen and was honored by The Scholastic Awards,” Mr. Avedon said in 1998. “Being recognized meant that little pat on the back, that sense of confidence that I could enter a life that I loved. And I had somebody behind me say, ‘This is O.K.'”
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