Please Welcome HOP's Artist of the Year Darren Smith.
His work, Mayflies, presents 121 studio portraits of real people in moments of vivid transformation, stripped of background to focus purely on their presence and individuality. Inspired by the mayfly’s short yet brilliant life, Smith’s portraits celebrate those who embrace their identities intensely and briefly.
Mayflies celebrates bold self-expression in a collection of studio portraits. For seven years, Amsterdam-based photographer Darren Smith travelled across three continents, capturing moments of radical self-expression and human connection at festivals, spectacles, and cultural gatherings.
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From the Author:
“Starting in the summer of 2016, I started travelling to crowded parade streets, joining post-apocalyptic sound camps, getting lost in the labyrinth of winding nightclub corridors, in search of creative souls. The essence of radical self-expression is freedom, vulnerability, and the courage to reveal one’s true self in the most unfiltered way possible. I was inspired to create a lasting legacy of these people in their self-expressed beauty.”
“In my work people would emerge from the crowd, step into the studio space, and we would begin, the heart of the spectacle pulsing around us. The people I captured were participants in something larger—a collective energy shaped by music, movement, and shared experience. Each person who stepped into the studio brought with them a fragment of that collective pulse. From those fragments, from an unscripted chaos, formed the 'decisive moments' I sought.”
— Darren Smith
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Published December 2024 by Lecturis
280 x 360 mm
208pp, 122 images
Hardback, cloth bound cover
ISBN 978-9462265332
