Captain Amelia

March 15, 2021
1 min read

This image of Elizabeth MacDougald portraying Captain Amelia from Disney’s Treasure Planet was taken in May 2020 as part of a home session during the pandemic.

There’s not much to say about home sessions. They work like so:

“Will you take photos of me in my Captain Amelia costume?”

“Yes.”

In this case, the impetus was fandom, appreciation for the character, and the arguably underrated animated film.

We thought it would be fun to create images inspired by the way nineteenth-century naval officers might have been painted.

These spontaneous home sessions happen infrequently—just enough to keep in practice.

And doctor, again with the greatest possible respect, zip your howling screamer.

Captain Amelia, Treasure Planet

Looking back on the last year of lockdown, perhaps we should have created more such projects; prior to this time, we were shooting continuously. But the pandemic seems to have changed everyone’s rhythms. For us, reading, painting, shows, website building, two-player tabletop games, learning new skills, and cooking have filled the time. The pace hasn’t necessarily slowed so much as the focus of the pace has changed, and with it, the stress and mania and chaos and overcommitting have dialed down to silence. One day the focus will change again, and the rush of activity will return.

When we had finished making Captain Amelia portraits, we moved on to Mara Jade from Star Wars’s expanded universe.

But that’s another story…

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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.

The All Worlds Traveller

Welcome to The All Worlds Traveller, an eclectic collection of thoughts, pictures, and stories from a Distant Era. Illustrated with Distant Era art and photographs, these pages explore the stories and worlds of people beyond the here and now, and the people and creative processes behind such stories. This is a blog about photography and narrative; history and myth; fantasy, science-fiction, and the weird; creation and experience. This is a blog about stories.

Steven Townshend

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.

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About a Distant Era

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.

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