Donavon Smallwood and Bryan Schutmaat on “Languor”

Join us for a special conversation between Aperture Portfolio Prize winners Donavon Smallwood (2021) and Bryan Schutmaat (2013) as they discuss Smallwood’s winning series Languor, meditative black-and-white photographs taken in New York’s Central Park, through which Smallwood envisions Black tranquility at the center of the urban landscape. Smallwood’s images, with their clarity and precision, invite viewers to consider Black people in natural settings connected to their own cultural history. As Smallwood himself affirms, “When you see Black people just being themselves, that’s what the art is.”

 The exhibition Donavon Smallwood: 2021 Aperture Portfolio Prize Winner is on view at Baxter St at the Camera Club of New York, July 21–August 25, 2021. For information regarding acquiring work from this series please email prints@aperture.org.

Donavon Smallwood (born in New York, 1994) is a self-trained photographer who grew up in a household that emphasized literature and a deep engagement with the tradition of art. For him, photography—like all art and creation—is a communion with the divine; and he uses the medium as a means of exploring humankind, imagination, essence, and nature. Smallwood holds a BA from Hunter College, New York. His first monograph is Languor (2021).

Bryan Schutmaat (born in Houston, 1983) is a photographer based in Austin, Texas. His work has been widely exhibited and published, and he has won numerous awards, including a Guggenheim Fellowship, Aperture Portfolio Prize, and Aaron Siskind Foundation fellowship. Schutmaat’s prints are held in many collections, including at the Baltimore Museum of Art; Museum of Fine Arts, Boston; Pier 24 Photography, San Francisco; and San Francisco Museum of Modern Art. He is cofounder of the imprint Trespasser.

Image Courtesy Donavon Smallwood