After viewing Jim Goldberg’s entrancing retrospective at Pier 24 Photography, stepping into Donavon Smallwood’s Languor, I felt an immediate sense of relief.
As I walked around the room, the large black and white photographs became their own religious experience. Every portrait was meditative—a place of reflection and resistance. Central Park, where all Smallwood’s photographs in this exhibition were taken, felt unfamiliar to the Central Park I know. The room was its own beautiful planet, enticing me to linger with the images and in this space.
I had an opportunity to catch up with Smallwood to discuss his experiences growing up in New York City and how the artist balanced the troubled history behind Seneca Village with his deep love for Central Park while making Languor.
Thomas Dunn (TD): You said you’re in New York right now–are you from there ?
Donavon Smallwood (DS): Yes. I was born and raised in Harlem, New York.
Installation photography by: Josef Jacques
TD: What was it like growing up in the city?
DS: I don’t know, it’s tough because everything [about growing up in New York] to me seems so normal. But when I hear about other people’s experiences growing up outside of New York, it’s so different. For me, growing up we had a lot of freedom, I guess.
Once you hit middle school, you get a Metro card and you use the card not just to go to school, you can go wherever you want. There’s so much to do here. There’s so much culture. As a kid I got to experience so much and it felt kind of normal. When I started going to other places that weren’t walkable or as diverse, I was like “oh this is the whole world isn’t like this.”
TD: Any places you loved to go?
DS: I would either go to the Chinatown area, Canal Street, or I would go just take the subway. I wouldn’t go that far. I would end up either doing that or going to Coney Island, which is really far from where I lived. I also went to Central Park, which is right across from where I am now. I would take the bus and go to Central Park and just hang out in the park all day.
TD: I love that. When did you first become interested in art and photography?
DS: I got more interested in art and photography through the internet. Growing up, I actually wanted to be an archaeologist and a poet. My whole plan was to become a guy who travels the world, goes on digs, and finds things.
It was my whole identity up until I turned 16 and I took a digital photography class. Because I wanted to be good at it, I started looking up photography online and tried to figure out how to get better images than the other kids. I fell in love with it.
I remember the teacher telling me that the interest that I have in archaeology and anthropology was similar to photography because as an archaeologist, you’re searching through different cultures while looking at artifacts. I relate that to photography and photographing the unknown qualities of people or different communities.
Later when I looked up National Geographic, I was like, “Okay, yeah, I kind of see that.” And I just stuck with photography from then on.
TD: The way that you photograph nature and people in black and white makes both feel equally and incredibly intimate. Can you tell me how Languor and the images within it came to be?
DS: I’ve been working on this project for years. All the photographs in this book project were taken in Central Park. I have photographed Central Park since I got into photography.
All the photographs were taken in the summer of 2020. I went there a lot because it was mid-pandemic and there was nothing else to do. So, once it felt kind of safe to go out, I’d go to the park every day and just hang out. Sometimes taking pictures, sometimes not.
Around the same exact time, all the civil unrest started happening because of the police brutality and the basically execution of people in the streets. The park became an oasis for me. I would go to the park, take photographs, and try to figure out if I can avoid the news cycle. I started doing a little bit more research about the park, and I found out about Seneca Village. Have you ever heard of that?
TD: I haven’t, tell me more!
DS: Seneca Village was a community that was based in the area that Central Park is in now, about on the upper part of the park, and it was a community of mostly African-Americans, Italian-Americans, and Irish-Americans who weren’t accepted in the developed parts of Manhattan yet.
It was in the mid-1800s, and by the late 1800s, the city decided they’re going to build Central Park. The whole community that lived there was hit with eminent domain. They were forcibly removed from the area. So, thinking about that history, which I had no idea about. It made me want to try to balance out that history with my love for the park.
TD: I love that. Can you talk a bit about the models that you were shooting? What is your relationship to them and what is your relationship to the locations in the images?
DS: I’d wake up pretty much every day at sunrise and I would walk through the park photographing different landscapes or different close-up details.
While doing that, I would also look around to see what would make a really great background—like florals for a portrait. When I would find a place, I would mark it down on my phone and then look for people in the park that I thought were interesting.
I would give them a description of the project I was working on and then ask if they’d be interested in being photographed. Pretty much everyone said yes. I think a big reason that people said yes [to having their photo taken] was because everyone I photographed was around my age so it was really easy to connect with them. I would meet people really close to the location I wanted to photograph or I would meet people somewhere in the park and I would say, “Hey, can you walk with me? Like five blocks up there’s this one spot.”
What’s interesting is that looking back on all the portraits, it seems like everyone is wearing jewelry or something. But I’m not sure what was getting me to pick the people I choose to work with, I don’t know.
But I did want to make sure that I was photographing Black people specifically because I wanted these photographs to center what I was learning about Seneca Village during the pandemic. Because most of the people were my age, I felt I was kind of photographing myself through other people.
Installation photography by: Josef Jacques
TD: To me, this work feels like an intervention of sorts. I wanted to ask how you think about your own work? Do you feel that your photography is political?
DS: For me, the goal was really simple, I just wanted to make images that I felt were indicative of some kind of beauty. I get the whole political thing because the work, itself, can’t not be political because of what I photographed and what I was thinking about. But I’ll say that I grew up in this park, this park was a huge part of my life, and after uncovering this history, it disillusioned me a bit.
When I was first working on Languor, after learning the history, I tried to make images that were angry. But after three weeks of photographing like that, I realized that’s not really how I felt, even with the history. I still felt so connected to this place because of what it meant for my childhood and who I am. So, I tried to find a way to balance all these feelings.
At the end of the project, I still feel like I came out with images that are beautiful. I wanted the places to appear mysterious. That’s what I felt my role was, to figure out how to display this place and come out with what I would consider to be beauty.
Installation photography by: Josef Jacques
TD: To be real, I got chills from that.
I wanted to mention the Ezra Pound poem “And the days are not full enough” that was included in the exhibition. Can you talk more about your choice for including that poem?
DS: I cannot remember when I first saw that poem. I still read poetry all the time, and I was trying to find something that would give me inspiration for a different project, but after reading that poem, it immediately reminded me of what I was making for Languor and how I was feeling at the time.
When I started reading more of [Ezra Pound’s] poetry, and found out what a radical figure he was, I thought it was even more perfect. The dichotomy between the words, and who people perceive Pound to be, I thought I had to include this. If not in the project itself then in the exhibition, on the website or something. It felt like a perfect split to me. It just made so much sense.
I do want the work to be poetic in a sense. I studied literature in school, so I like to consider myself moving forward as a book artist. I want to make a lot of photography books in the future, too. Having a literature and poetry base helps me with the sequencing of the images. How they’re displayed and how the book is formed as a different kind of art form itself.
This review was made possible thanks to the generous support of Pier 24 Photography.
Donovan Smallwood’s series Languor is featured in TURNING THE PAGE
Pier 24 Photography, San Francisco, CA
April 15, 2024 – January 31, 2025