The photographer showing why we still need raves, carnivals, and communities that last only one night

For months, they prepare costumes, performances, masks and alter egos that they will wear for only a few hours. Then they return to their everyday lives and wait an entire year to do it all again. More than the individual subcultures themselves, this suspended time is the real subject of Mayflies, the project that led American photographer Darren Smith to spend seven years travelling through festivals, carnivals, cosplay conventions, nightlife scenes and underground gatherings across Europe, North America and Latin America.

Ravers, burlesque dancers, dominatrixes, rappers, metalheads, queer performers, cosplayers and participants in traditional carnivals: at first glance, the people featured in the project seem to belong to entirely different worlds. Yet, looking at the archive Smith built across 34 events on three continents, a deeper similarity emerges: the desire to be recognised by others, to express oneself collectively and to find, if only for one night, a place where one can feel part of something.

The origins of Mayflies coincide with a moment of personal transformation for the artist. After moving to Amsterdam, Smith—who grew up in a conservative environment in the American South—began documenting the city’s nightlife and discovered worlds from which he had once felt excluded. “I was this open-minded stranger, who they welcomed in, and allowed me to capture them,” he tells Domus. “They had somewhere they felt they could call ‘home’, and that’s what I admired in them and I was looking for myself.”

Darren Smith

The turning point came when he discovered Worlds in a Small Room, the celebrated book by Irving Penn. To make those portraits, the American photographer built a portable studio that he installed in radically different settings, isolating his subjects inside a “small room”. Smith decided to adopt a similar strategy, creating a mobile studio that he could bring into festivals, carnivals and subcultural gatherings, building a temporary space where people could represent themselves. His goal is not so much to document entertainment itself, but what happens at its margins. The neutral backdrop removes distractions and makes the identities constructed by participants more visible: precise, vulnerable and charged with the social energy of the environments in which they emerge.

The fleeting nature of these communities is already embedded in the project’s title. Mayflies are insects that live for only a single day, spending their brief existence dancing, meeting and reproducing. “Mayflies live this glorious life, where they dance around one another for a single day,” Smith says. “They meet, mate, then they’re gone. Then next year, they’re back again.”

Watching these insects, the photographer recognised something in the people he was documenting. Many festival and carnival participants spend months—sometimes an entire year—preparing an appearance that will last only a few hours or days. Once the event is over, the community seems to dissolve immediately. Yet its disappearance is only apparent: preparations for the next edition often begin the very next day. “The ephemeral nature of their existence gave me a realisation: for these individuals there is no after,” he explains. “When the event is over, they are already planning the next one. There’s only ever a before and during.” For Smith, Mayflies ultimately comes down to the same insight suggested by the insects themselves: the joy of belonging, even if only temporarily.

Darren Smith

“One of the things that surprised me in the beginning was how often I would meet the same people at completely different events,” he says. “Someone I’d photograph at a cosplay convention would reappear at a queer festival, or underground goth party.” 

Rather than becoming a catalogue of subcultures, Mayflies has gradually turned into an atlas of rituals and communities that take shape around music, performance and collective imagination, at a time when many independent spaces are increasingly fragile.

Music lies at the heart of the communities photographed by Smith, but his relationship with it has been anything but straightforward. Growing up during the years of the “Satanic Panic” in the American South, he discovered grunge and heavy metal thanks to an older cousin who secretly watched MTV in his basement. “Music was a rebellion,” he recalls.

Years later, however, his cousin’s sudden death led him to distance himself from it entirely. “I just stopped listening to music for about ten years,” he says. “That time period feels like a soundless void.” For the photographer, Mayflies also became a process of personal reconciliation—a way of repairing a connection that had been broken long before.

Darren Smith

“More than listening, I love being surrounded by people who do like to make music. I love being involved in the creative process,” he says. “Music is deeply personal to me, and when I’m tapped into that source, I’m connected to those that I love the most.”

“‘You look amazing, follow me,’ is all it takes to bring someone in from the crowd,” Smith says of a creative process that combines intimacy and play, fantasy and reality. Every photograph emerges from the encounter between the photographer and the unrepeatable circumstances created by the event itself: the music, the aesthetics and the moment when people feel free enough to express themselves. “They wait all year for this opportunity to be together and they go to such extraordinary lengths to transform themselves, for such a short period of time,” he says. “I see the photography as a tribute to them.”

Smith describes each portrait as a negotiation built from shared experiences within the event, between the person behind the camera and the one standing in front of it. “The interactions are an unscripted chaos of ideas that build to a moment of stillness,” he explains. “I am searching for a decisive moment where they are temporarily aligned between environment and performance.”

To describe this dimension, the photographer references Japanese ukiyo-e, the “floating world” depicted in prints dedicated to nightlife and pleasure districts. “Removing the background and placing the subjects within the studio space, we together weave this illusion of a space both concrete and imagined, deliberate and spontaneous—a floating world of our own.”

More than an anthropological account of marginal worlds or eccentric identities, Mayflies captures the moment when a person recognises themselves within a community—and is recognised by others. For Smith, this need is far from new. “If you look at medieval carnivals, religious festivals, and ancient rites, they served similar functions,” he says. Today, however, “the digital age has made us so much more vulnerable”, and temporary communities continue to offer something that online networks struggle to provide: genuine presence, shared experience and human connection.

The value of these spaces became particularly evident during the pandemic. “I think many people only became aware of this when communal spaces suddenly disappeared,” he says. “That absence and the damage it caused revealed how much events like these contribute to our sense of belonging.”

What makes these communities so remarkable, Smith argues, is their ability to temporarily dissolve the barriers that usually separate people. “They provide an immediate experience that allows us to see our inner selves and see one another,” he explains. “The openness that can emerge in these spaces is increasingly rare elsewhere.” Over the years, he has often asked participants why they feel the need to build these ephemeral worlds. The answer he hears most frequently is as simple as it is revealing: “This place is me, and I am it.”

This is also why he looks with concern at the growing restrictions imposed on rave culture and self-organised spaces. “What’s often misunderstood is that these spaces aren’t about forgetting the outside world,” he says. “They can enable you to remember who you are.”

Darren Smith

The stakes, then, go far beyond a single night of entertainment. “If we lose the independent spaces,” he concludes, “we risk losing our freedom, our sense of identity, and our curiosity about the world. To me, that’s everything.”

Following the publication of the book Mayflies in 2024, the project is entering a new international phase. In 2026, Smith will present the work at the Abuja Photo Festival in Nigeria, where he will develop new research on local masqueraders through an artist residency. The same year, he will be an artist in residence at Amsterdam’s THNK Festival, while in 2027 he has been invited as the festival’s only official photographer to exhibit at the Surva Festival in Bulgaria, one of Europe’s most important celebrations of masked traditions and recognised by UNESCO as an Intangible Cultural Heritage.

A trajectory that suggests Smith’s real interest lies not in documenting individual subcultures, but in observing how human beings, across vastly different cultural and geographical contexts, continue to create forms of shared identity. After seven years of travel, encounters and photographs, the real subject of Mayflies is not raves, carnivals or queer festivals. It is the communities that, for a few hours or a few days, give themselves the opportunity to reimagine who they are.