City Sorceress

May 24, 2021
2 mins read
Urban Fantasy with Elizabeth MacDougald

The very first Distant Era series was Urban Fantasy, photographed on city streets in the boiling summer nights of July 2019. As we come up on Distant Era’s two-year anniversary, we’ll post the original Distant Era images here and expand the galleries on distantera.com.

Like all the series that followed it, Urban Fantasy was highly experimental. The photography goal was to capture portraits on the city streets at night that featured city lights. The challenge was to balance correct exposure of the subject (lit by flash) with correct exposure of the background (not lit by flash).

The artistic goal was to create a fantasy Chicago, establishing little bits of lore around the characters that would appear in the portraits.

For example, in this image, Elizabeth MacDougald plays her character Raquel Miriam Morgana, an urban sorceress inspired by the character Rachel from The Hollows series, by Kim Harrison (that series is set in Cincinnati, hence the Over the Rhine shirt). As we drove around looking for places to shoot, we found an occult book store window that we thought would provide just the right light for this kind of image.

As is the case for most of what I shoot, it seems, I get it right on the first take and then spend weeks trying to recreate what I did. In this photograph, the subject and the background are in focus. The off-camera flash is lighting the right side of the image, while a nice warm glow from the book store creates a beautiful rim light on the left. The subject is in focus and the background is soft. However, this is all harder than it looks. In the following weeks of the project, I would try to recreate these settings with mixed success. Eventually, I looked back at the settings on this photo, which I shot on a 24-70 mm lens. I shot it at f/2.8, ISO 100, shutter speed 1/5 second. A tripod was key to getting the shot at those settings, which I learned the hard way when I neglected to use one in some of the weeks that followed.

Those following weeks would take us all around the city at night, with various friends and colleagues who became part of the series, playing angels, demons, magicians, fairies, and kings. As the series developed, lore began to suggest itself, and a world began to form around the characters.

It was the first official Distant Era project and the first planned series. As this interesting world and these characters developed, I thought it might continue as an evergreen series over time. Perhaps someday we’ll return to it. This past weekend, we had our first casual/spontaneous gatherings with our wider networks of friends for the first time in over a year. New sessions are gradually coming in, but post-pandemic life is like waking up groggy after a long sleep. New series will come in a few months, after we get used to living in the world again. In the meantime, we’ll look back on the characters, locations, and lore in the coming weeks.

Here’s a witchy quote from city sorceress Elizabeth MacDougald as the character she portrays, Raquel Miriam Morgana:

“It should not be this easy. The orbs pulled from nothing, the circles cast with barely a thought, the spells that slip like silk from her lips.

And yet it is. The race of fire through her veins, the rush, the sensual whisper…

She hears the other whispers, the ones from the real world: demon.

She feels the black slip into her aura a little more each time, but she pays the price. It is worth it…for her city, her friends, her family…to protect them. And she knows that should the time ever come where she is the monster…those she has protected will protect her from herself.”

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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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