Over seven years, from 2016 to 2023, Darren traveled across Europe, North America, and Latin America. The work focuses on gatherings that exist for a limited time yet persist through cycles of preparation, repetition, and return. Rather than approaching festivals, carnivals, and subcultural events as spectacle, Mayflies considers them as structured environments: ritual frameworks governed by shared codes, seasonal rhythms, and collective labour. What emerges is not simply self-expression, but a form of collective participation in which identity is shaped in relation to others, through costume, gesture, and craftsmanship.      

The title refers to the mayfly, an insect that lives only briefly, compressing an entire life into a single day. For Smith, this becomes a metaphor for the people he photographs: individuals who spend months, often an entire year, preparing for a moment of appearance in which they fully inhabit a constructed identity, before returning to everyday life.      

At the core of the work is a sustained engagement with these events as recurring ecosystems. The visible moment of celebration is only the surface of a longer process: making, rehearsing, and refining appearance over time. Smith's practice is grounded in direct encounter. Using a portable studio installed within each event, Smith temporarily removes his subjects from the surrounding intensity, allowing their constructed personas to emerge with clarity and presence. Against a neutral backdrop, subjects are temporarily removed from their surroundings, yet remain marked by them through details and the visual codes they carry.      

The resulting portraits operate between document and performance, revealing identity as something crafted, inhabited, and socially shared. Each photograph becomes a meeting point between fantasy and reality, where carefully built personas are presented with a level of precision that reveals both their construction and their lived presence.      

First presented in book form by Lecturis in 2024, Mayflies is conceived as an evolving body of work.

Mayflies book available here and select bookstores.