Sean Fader Invites Us Into His Sugar Daddy Wonderland

Somewhere inside the walls of her San Francisco chateau, author Danielle Steel is smiling—or is simply beside herself. It all depends on how you look at artist and photographer Sean Fader’s archaeological exploits the last few years, of which Steel—a prolific romance novelist—became an unlikely fixture.

The story begins innocently enough, with Fader (Assistant Professor, Department of Photography & Imaging) making inquiries into the origins of the “sugar daddy” as part of a themed project alongside his New Orleans artist collective. He soon uncovers a century-old tale of sugar magnate Adolph Spreckels and his 24-years-younger wife, Alma de Bretteville Spreckels, for whom he purchased what is now known as the Spreckels Mansion. Perched atop the Pacific Heights neighborhood of San Francisco, the structure serves as something of a monolith to the original—and quite literal—sugar daddy and his beloved.

In a delightful twist of fate, Fader, ever the exhaustive researcher, is led to the current owner and occupant of the French Classical mansion: Danielle Steel, best known for spinning saccharine love stories for romance readers. Now weeks into a still shapeless project, and knee deep in an unlikely tapestry of archives that weave together the lives of Adolph, Alma, and Steel, Fader is left with one gnawing question: what to make of this? Or better yet, what to make about this?

At times, Fader (Assistant Professor, Department of Photography & Imaging) himself strains to explain the journey that led him to developing Sugar Daddy: Dear Danielle, a selection of portraits and self-portraits (with some seductive voiceover work by Tisch Grad Acting alum Jay Myers) shot and framed in a style that juxtaposes the historical opulence of its influences with self-aware camp. Its centerpiece, a society portrait that features Fader posed alongside a much younger lover, affirms the spirit of his work: an exercise in reimagining queerness in unexpected spaces, and an ode to the many prisms through which identity is formed and observed. 

Sugar Daddy: Dear Danielle is on exhibit at Denny Gallery in New York and runs through June 24th. Visit Sean Fader’s website to learn more and experience Fader’s many projects, including Insufficient Memory, an interactive map that memorializes the sites of hate crimes committed against queer people. 

When you began researching the provenance of the term sugar daddy—unconscious to the story’s eccentricities at that point—what was your roadmap for the project?  

I was living in New Orleans and I was part of a group of artists that run a gallery there called Antenna Collective. We were invited to be part of Prospect 5, which is New Orleans’ big triennial. For a lot of reasons, all of which I’ll spare you, the Collective decided that the theme of the show would be sugar.

In that process I was like, okay, we have somebody over there that's doing the history of sugar plantations in the Southeast, we have this person over here that's working on the slave trade—all of these things were already happening in the show. And I've been making a piece that is leaving Los Angeles and is going to San Francisco about the history of queer hate crimes, so I felt like I needed something to lighten my way through this. And I made the joke, ‘Well, I'm just going to do something about sugar daddies.’ Then I looked up where the term came from, found Alma de Bretteville Spreckels, and kind of got lost in her story. 

I found out that she had coined the phrase ‘sugar daddy’ in 1904 to describe her husband, and I don't know how she would have thought of herself, but there's evidence of her being quite the queer ally.

And then in the most unlikely of turns, this leads you to the romance novelist Danielle Steel…

I was reading a lot about this big, gorgeous house that Alma built in San Francisco. I became obsessed with this photograph of either a trans person or crossdresser—it’s unclear how they would have identified at that moment in 1913—sitting on the arm of a chair in her house at 2080 Washington Street for the family Christmas party.

And I'm like, ‘I wonder what that house looks like; I wonder if it's still there.’ So I looked it up, and the original sugar daddy house is now being occupied by Danielle Steel. How is that possible?! So it became this dual obsession with these two women who seem to overlap in this house, but also overlap in all these other ways.

You use the term queer melodrama to convey the lens through which you examine the intersecting lives of Alma, her ‘sugar daddy’ Adolph, and Danielle. How did you land on this whimsical style of self-portraiture?

I was obsessively researching Alma and Danielle and in that process I found myself with way too much information. But I discovered that Danielle Steel had written over 200 books on a typewriter, and I decided I should write her a letter. So the initial letter is a proposal, basically, ‘I want to go into your house, and I want to make a photograph of me performing as Adolph Spreckels, the original sugar daddy…’

But I spent all this time researching and researching, and it was six weeks in and I had made nothing. It was possibly the least productive way that a historian could ever go about anything if they really wanted to be an academic historian. And every night at dinner I'm reporting to the other artists—there's like 12 of us there—about Danielle Steel, Alma, and sugar daddies, and pop suckers, and all these weird things. So how do I get all this information out? The original thought process in my proposal letter to her was that I would make a photograph [in the home]. And yet, all of this was going to be thousands of pages of history to make one photograph. 

Ultimately it was helpful for me to see there's a lot more stuff here. I want to make work that both of them would love, right? So I looked at paintings that Alma would have been looking at when she was visiting Paris, and fashion that she would have been looking at when she was visiting Paris, and researching the different colorways that those things might have been in, and then picking ones that I think Danielle Steel would like. In looking at photographs of them, and the ways in which they were having themselves photographed, I tried to make images that they would both love.

This work blurs some lines between historical fact and fiction, and very playfully so. What kinds of conversations has this elicited with audiences?

I think this often happens with my work because I was an actor and so I come at visual art in a very different way. Our world oftentimes celebrates this sort of navel-gazing—paintings about paintings about paintings. But I did a walk-through the other day and we had a really good time. It's a slightly different conversation that happens about this work because you rarely see funny shows in art galleries. I think a lot of people really enjoy it for that. 

How does working with the next generation of creators at Tisch influence your decision-making as an artist?

I think there are a couple of things. My undergrad was musical theater, and one of my great mentors unfortunately died and I remember hearing people talk about her at the memorial. Somebody said this phrase that stuck with me: ‘She treated us as if we were her emerging peers.’ And I really loved that. And so that's something that I really try to do in my classroom. 

The students do influence me a lot, and my work oftentimes is dealing with social media… And I need the hive mind of all of my students to think through images with me on a regular basis, because their whole life has had the Internet. For some of them, their baby pictures were public. So their understanding of what a photograph is is really different than somebody who's 75. They just don't think about photographs the same way. I think it's important to be in dialogue with people whose experience of a photograph is really different. They're telling me a lot about their experiences of the world and making pictures, and that helps me be a better educator and a better artist.