Taken on an iPhone, this photograph by Donavon Smallwood (b.1994) captures a meditative moment of still at his apartment in New York. Untitled is rigorously composed with the seriality of the horizontal blind slats broken up by verticals made up of various other blind components. Further visual intrigue is created through the flowers that dominate the bottom left section of the image, perfectly framed by the silhouette of the window behind.
In 2021, Smallwood was awarded the Aperture Portfolio Prize for his series, Langour (2020), in which he photographed various figures in the parks of Harlem. Aperture praised this series for ‘its envisioning of black tranquility’ and, while there are no figures in Untitled, Smallwood’s innate sense of tranquility persists.