Mayflies Epilogue

Darren Smith is a talented photographer, a critical observer of his subjects and also a playful instigator in the process. He is a gentle soul with a specific vision for how to create space for self-expression. Mayflies provides a clear insight into the evolution of his creative process.

Darren has been a dear friend, a co-conspirator, and a creative partner to me for nearly twenty years now. He was the last photographic assistant to my father, Stan Shaffer before he passed away in 2010. He asked me to write for Mayflies to tell some of our stories.

My father lived in our childhood home on the Upper West Side in New York City for the vast majority of his life. There was always a revolving cast of characters: models, assistants, stylists, musicians, and other friends from the social fabric of their lives. Orphans’ thanksgiving dinners, debate, backgammon matches, extended listening sessions, it was always a lively space.  By the time Dad began work on his photographic anthology I was in my mid-20s, living downtown and deeply engaged in my own creative endeavors on the evolving internet. I would stop in for visits with Dad at home, and this is where I met Darren and witnessed he, Dad, and my sister Allie working together in earnest on cataloguing and digitizing film from over forty years of his career. I sometimes felt bittersweet about this process, wanting to be more involved, but put bluntly, I don’t recall anyone more capable of working with Dad in those days than Darren, painstakingly both getting work done as he was able and also taking in all of the stories, outbursts, and tangents as Darren did. His dry humor and wit, patience with Dad, and burgeoning critical eye contributed to this being a beautiful opportunity for them both.

Dad later moved to France somewhat unexpectedly prior to the book being finished, and they dutifully packed the archives and shipped them across the Atlantic, landing in a barn in the village of Razac-de-Saussignac. Dad had decided to move in with a former flame, who became his wife in the last years of his life, Louise Robey. It was a simple existence, and sometimes a painful one, but it provided the setting for the book to be completed and a space to work that was away from the distractions of the city. Darren went along for some of this process, and it was there that we became closer when I would come visit.

Late nights sitting up on the roof staring into the night sky, or evenings gazing over the wine soaked countryside. Beyond the project itself and their lives in France, we spent our time discussing photography and the work of artists we were interested in, music and club culture, and what it meant to express one’s self. These precious conversations brought us closer together, and it was here that the beginnings of the shared belief that we too could work together were formed. I remember quite vividly, the last time I saw Dad as I boarded my flight from Bergerac back home, giving him and Darren hugs, somehow with a subconscious sense that something would be different some 18 months before he passed away.

I have so much gratitude for Darren’s ability to work with one of the great artists of his time who was also one of the more challenging characters in his profession. I know it was formative for them both. They learned so much together. Perhaps I even felt jealous of their process, so tangled in what I thought I needed to be doing with my own life at the time.

“Here it is, I’m done.” Dad expressed in his email to the editor at TeNeues, before he passed away in his sleep on June 10, 2010 at 66. His words lingering in all of our minds as we returned to Razac to pack up the archives. Thanks to the efforts of the whole team, the book was ultimately published by Hendrik TeNeues in the fall of 2010.

Darren and Matilda continued growing their life together in Amsterdam, I went west to California to escape the daily awareness of Dad’s existence in New York and to start a new life with my partner Annabel, while working amongst those I thought were the best in my field in Palo Alto and then San Francisco. Allie stayed in New York for some time building her career and eventually returned to Seattle to be closer to our mother.

We had told Dad before he passed that we would do something more with the archives. It took many years to become comfortable with working on them and in the process through occasional consultation with Darren and shared dialogue, we developed a groundbreaking process to digitize the film by photographing it with a medium format camera, which allowed for more flexibility and higher quality scans that we previously had the capacity to complete. Facebook, where I was then working, had gone public, and I was finally in a position to invest meaningfully in the tools needed to start working on a show together.

Stefan Simchowitz and I met through Sean Parker, whom he was advising at the time, and quickly became friends. His reputation in the art world precedes him, and I at one point lamented that I’d love to show Dad’s work, but did not want to sell original material as I didn’t need to. It was his inspiration to do the show in the context of Dad’s work through my eyes, or ultimately ours - as Darren excitedly changed his plans and came to California to live with me and print the show together. This was an intensely creative and also painful period, documented by our dear friend John Dill, as I moved out of my shared home with Annabel and we separated, but it provided quite a clear path for our creative process. Thanks to Stefan’s influence, Andrew McClintock phoned and offered us a date 6 months later at his Ever Gold gallery in SF and asked if we could be ready in time. I am so tremendously grateful for the opportunity to do this show together, for the collaboration with Darren and my sister Allie, and the support from Stefan, Andrew, John, Annabel and so many others in this process.

Concurrently, while Darren had been developing his career as a photographer and his life with Matilda, I’d been diving deeper in the Burning Man community, via a camp and creative collective called Robot Heart. Soon after arriving in California after Dad’s passing, I found my way to Burning Man that August, feeling that a walk in the desert might be a good way to process Dad’s passing. After years of my own evolution from a tourist to a participant to a producer and a deeply ingrained sense of the potential for personal growth and processing that this environment held, I was fascinated to find Darren exploring similar ideas around festival and club culture in Europe on his own terms via his photographic work.

Radical self-expression and immediacy are 2 of the 10 Burning Man principles that feel particularly relevant to Darren’s work.

From Larry Harvey, the late founder of the event:

“Radical self-expression arises from the unique gifts of the individual. No one other than the individual or a collaborating group can determine its content. It is offered as a gift to others. In this spirit, the giver should respect the rights and liberties of the recipient.”

“Immediate experience is, in many ways, the most important touchstone of value in our culture. We seek to overcome barriers that stand between us and a recognition of our inner selves, the reality of those around us, participation in society, and contact with a natural world exceeding human powers. No idea can substitute for this experience.”

Thoughts about whether or not Burning Man was in some context, the Studio 54 of our time, what it meant to participate in festival culture, and many of the values that connected festival communities were very much on our minds as we lived and worked together for the next six months. The realization that we’ve moved so far beyond Studio 54, and that presence above all is the key really struck us. Darren had already begun his work on what would become Mayflies in this period, and I recall looking in awe at early images from some of the first festivals he set up shop at.

He seemed to have managed to develop a communication style, and a perspective, that was again for me very reminiscent of Irving Penn. Setting up a small studio on a festival site, he immersed himself in the culture and found people at their most fully expressed, independently of the anticipation of preparing for a photograph. This intersection of the studio with vivid reality and the candid but fully expressed nature of the subject is what I believe set Worlds in a Small Room apart, and is also part of what I find so interesting about Darren’s work on Mayflies. For Worlds In a Small Room, the self proclaimed ambulant studio photographer constructed a tent based studio and travelled to record individuals in their cultures around the world. For Mayflies, Smith, constructs his portable studio within festivals and builds a container for them to be seen fully at their most expressed. It is remarkable to witness.

Years later, a particularly powerful moment we shared was at the non-sanctioned Renegade burn in the Black Rock Desert in Nevada. We invited Darren to set up his studio at the back of the Robot Heart Bus and work in our environment for a few days in the desert. You’ve witnessed some of these images in Mayflies. From printing, to dialogue in friendship, to work in the field, I cherish time spent working creatively with Darren Smith. He is an artist of the first order and I can’t imagine what he’ll do next.