Donavon Smallwood: 2021 Aperture Portfolio Prize Winner

With his meditative black-and-white project Languor, a series of photographs taken in New York’s Central Park, Donavon Smallwood envisions Black tranquility at the center of the urban landscape. As Mikelle Street writes in Aperture, Smallwood’s body of work was inspired by The Lost Neighborhood under New York’s Central Park, an eight-minute documentary released on Vox in 2020 that tells the story of Seneca Village, a nineteenth-century African American community located on land that is now Central Park. Interested in how the public space was stripped from that community, Smallwood intended to create a narrative of Black life distant from the demands and distortions of the news cycle. 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 Aperture Portfolio Prize aims to spotlight new talent in photography,
identifying contemporary trends in the field and highlighting artists whose
work deserves greater recognition. Smallwood’s work, chosen from more than 1,200 submissions, appears in the Summer 2021 issue of Aperture magazine, and he received a $3,000 cash prize.

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, Languor (2021).