Superstar DJ and godfather of the Detroit techno movement, Derrick May’s  life as a solo performing artist propels him on a trajectory of almost  constant trans-global travel. For 30 years he has quietly, methodically, obsessively photographed his journeying and the dance events that  punctuate it.

An avid collector of classic cameras and vintage optics, May is  drawn to the convenience and immediacy of new generation pocket portable cameras. Shooting from plane, train, taxi or on foot,  in a prolific stream of  stills and  video  he documents futuristic architecture, the distorted time-space of international travel, the opulence of big city  hospitality, and the fleeting high-tech escapism of dance club  night-time worlds.

Much like his music, Mays  images  are spontaneous, unselfconscious, sensual  and technically raw. His  style is free, slightly rough, funky with a hi tek sensibility. A quick eye for composition elevates his work  above the level of a celebrity performers travelog. A sense of space and rhythm shows May is a  practiced observer with  an intuitive feel  for connected movement, creating bold  compositions with  visual counter-point, and spatial rhythms add a musical quality to a visual  sensibility that is  profoundly  techno. Moments of stillness are rare. Unpopulated architectural studies reverberate with the  ambience of  imminent departure. A feeling of constant motion pervades  fleeting moments observed in a transient cyclic narrative of departure from Detroit, through  artificial landscapes and time fragmented, then back to Detroit. The effect is  simultaneously futurist and nostalgic, ecstatic and tragic.

In moments captured  at home with  family, backdropped by the dystopic  wasteland of urban Detroit, the contrast between  worlds  is tangible,  at times alarming, and these images are among  the most poignant.

At the climax of his journeying , magic occurs in moments  mid-performance, the gaze is turned onto his audience, capturing  Derrick Mays  unique  viewpoint  from the centre stage of  global dance club culture.

In 2010 May asked  Mike Weston take a production role  bringing  this major body of  image work to public eyes.  In 2012 Weston  produced   the first Transience:Fragmented Time  series of  experimental photo-montage  works created from Mays images. A selection  of prints were exhibited  at 2012  Detroit  Backpack festival. Creative directions forged  in this develoment  seeded further design and  a video   teaser created with Tom Ludvigson  for    Karim Sahraoui’s   “The Eternal EP”.(Transmat MS200 ).