The Black Knight Production Images

Last weekend, it was my great pleasure to see The Black Knight, “a timely tale of love, trust, and resistance set in Nazi-occupied Prague,” by Angeli Primlani, from Lifeboat Productions.

When the show opened last month The All Worlds Traveller posted preproduction and press images for The Black Knight. Now here are some images from the production itself.

I enjoy both the preproduction and production image processes. They are different processes, the former often being a very experimental and improvisational playground and the latter being a process of capturing everyone’s work—director, actors, lighting, costumes, set, production—in a single frame. For example, in the final shot in the gallery above, I wanted to keep the color and quality of the lighting design and the shadow created by the gobo of the window while using my own light to fill in the actors’ faces and make them stand out. In the convent image preceding that one, the scene is composed so that Gary (playing Albrecht) hunches in shadow while Katherine (playing Kati) is in the light—the lighting design and direction revealing where those characters are at the present moment of the play. In photographing the production, we made sure to carefully set up our lights to achieve that look.

The cast and crew of The Black Knight did a wonderful job bringing this play to life after many years in the making. Now in its final week, audiences have four more chances to see it.* I was honored to be one of those audience members last Friday night. Enormous thanks to Lifeboat Productions for all their hard work and wonderful collaboration!

* Four more chances to see it LIVE, that is. Lifeboat is working a very cool and innovative way to take the production into your home via the miracle of technology! Follow their Facebook on the show for news and updates on that cool new process.

Finally, here are a couple fun retro movie still/poster designs I played around with for Lifeboat to help imbue this production image with the feel of another era.

Meanwhile, After the Show, and Soon…

Here is a post-show photo of the subject of the upcoming portrait #14 in The People of Light and Shadow series alongside the subject of portrait #1, “The Changeling.”

The People of Light and Shadow will return with this most sorcerous of the fey.

October 7, 2024

Northlight Gala 2024: A Starlit Soirée

September 23, 2024

THE TEMPEST Production and Press Photography with Idle Muse Theatre Company

August 12, 2024

A Midsummer Night’s Dream Poster Session with Babes With Blades Theatre Company

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Steven Townshend is a fine art/portrait photographer and writer with a background in theatre, written narrative, and award-winning game design. As a young artist, Steven toured the US and Canada performing in Shakespeare companies while journaling their moments on paper and film. In his transition from stage to page, Steven continued to work as a theatre photographer, capturing dramatic scenes while incorporating elements of costume, makeup, and theatrical lighting in his work. Drawn to stories set in other times and places, Steven creates works through which fellow dreamers and time travelers might examine their own humanity or find familiar comfort in the reflections of the people and places of a distant era.

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I’m Steven Townshend—your guide, scribe, editor, and humble narrator. The All Worlds Traveller is my personal publication, an exploratory conversation about stories and how we interact with them, from photographs to narratives to games—a kind of variety show in print. It is a conversation with other artists who explore the past, the future, and the fantastical in their work. Not one world—but all worlds. Where Distant Era shows stories in images, The All Worlds Traveller is all about the words.

Distant Era creates fine art and portrait photographs of people and places from imagined pasts, possible futures, and magical realities. In collaboration with other artists, we evoke these distant eras with theatrical costume and makeup, evocative scenery, and deliberate lighting, and we enhance them with contemporary tools to cast these captured moments in the light of long ago or far away. We long to walk the lion-decorated streets of Babylon, to visit alien worlds aboard an interstellar vessel, and to observe the native dances of elves. Our images are windows to speculative realities and postcards from the past. They are consolation for fellow time travelers who long to look beyond the familiar scenery of the present and gaze upon the people and places of a distant era.