Golden Age of the Silver Screen is a new black-and-white series from Distant Era in which we time travel back to the era of big pictures, big studios, big stars, big lights. This week, we present pictures from our Golden Age of the Silver Screen series with multi-talented performer/filmmaker/clown Elizabeth Quilter. Even though Elizabeth was the last subject we photographed for this series, Sunday was her birthday, so we wanted to get these ready for her to celebrate with and enjoy.
Distant Era Series
Distant Era series are personal art projects, created in order to experiment and play; follow a creative impulse to see where it leads; learn new techniques; show off what we can do; create new packages or offerings for future clients; and they’re a structured way to hang out with old friends and build bonds with new ones; they can also be a way of making something with, and for, a friend.
Most projects I do are client projects, and these always take first priority. I absolutely love building and delivering people’s dreams. Distant Era series, however, focus on my own dreams and the things I want to make in collaboration with my friends.
I’m currently working on a series called Gods and Heroes of the Aegean, a series with a steep learning curve, which I photographed in 2023. That series focuses on photo compositing. In 2025, I’d like to produce some work that takes a shorter time to complete, and Golden Age of the Silver Screen is the first of those projects.
Golden Age of the Silver Screen
The idea for Golden Age of the Silver Screen came from watching a video from photographer Lindsay Adler about black-and-white Old Hollywood photography a few years ago. Distant Era’s work being about times and places beyond the here and now, this seemed like a fun direction to explore someday. In late 2023 and early 2024, I began to prepare myself to shoot such a series but lacked the time to focus on it.
The main creative impulse behind Golden Age of the Silver Screen is an exploration of hard light. Conventional advice was to photograph subjects with big, soft portrait lighting. Hard light, like direct sunlight, or direct flash that makes stark, defined shadows, evoked memories of my early flash photographs on film from the ‘80s and ‘90s, or outdoor photographs on bright, cloudless days where hard shadows and too-bright highlights can make for unflattering portraiture. Thus, I’ve had a love/fear relationship with hard light since I began shooting with flash (around 2017). Yet, hard light looks great when properly controlled. So my mission in this project was to practice such control and develop a more intuitive understanding of hard light, sans color.
As I researched the project, I began to learn about photographers like George Hurrell, C. S. Bull, Laszlo Willinger, and E. R. Richee, to study their work, and see how they photographed their portraits.
Subjects
My goal for 2025 was to make a variety of small projects with a variety of friends. For Golden Age of the Silver Screen, I recruited from friends who were classic Hollywood film buffs; friends I’d always wanted to shoot with but never had; friends who’d booked as clients; and friends who work on my creative team. Ultimately, these projects are a way to spend time with people who don’t mind waiting a while for me to experiment and learn or take a break from the project to turn over work for clients.
Elizabeth Quilter
Elizabeth Quilter is a theatre artist, filmmaker, clown, and film buff. We met when Elizabeth played a role in a play I’d written called The Trolls. We worked together previously on The People of Light and Shadow, when she embodied Queen Mab, “The Faeries’ Midwife.”
RIGHT: Elizabeth Quilter in Distant Era’s Golden Age of the Silver Screen.
For Golden Age of the Silver Screen, Elizabeth brings a look that is inspired by Marlene Dietrich, Anna May Wong, and Fred Astaire.
We photographed Elizabeth last in the first wave of this project. As I experimented with edits on the first subjects’ photographs, I found myself softening the images and looking around for a means to boost halation on the skin and highlights. For Elizabeth’s session, I experimented with softening filters on my lenses in hopes that this would bring me closer to the look I was going for. I was pleased with the result, which I thought looked closer to the style of classic Hollywood portraits I’d used as inspiration.
We tried many different looks during our session. My favorite look was a four-light setup that used a big, hard reflector as the main light, another hard reflector for fill, a rim light, and a background spotlight projected over Elizabeth and onto the background.
As usual, we continued to experiment and fine tune our lights and looks over the course of several hours. This is the other benefit of doing a personal session with a friend—so much space to try things and make adjustments. As the last in the series that I’ve photographed, I had the opportunity to build on what I’d learned from earlier shoots.
Hair and Makeup
Elizabeth prepared for the shoot by booking an appointment with her stylist, Antje Kastner-Panya, who gave her a classic period hairstyle. It was amazing to see her when she appeared for the shoot, as she looked like she’d walked in from another era. While energetic ‘80s has been my default music for most photo sessions, our Golden Age of the Silver Screen sessions have all been set to classic swing music, interspersed with old radio commercials. That music, combined with Elizabeth’s period hairstyle, evoked the era as we did our session.
More to Come
Golden Age of the Silver Screen has been a fun series to work on. It’s given me the opportunity to learn about photographers from the early twentieth century and admire their work. It’s helped me get comfortable with a wide variety of lights and modifiers and complex light setups. I look forward to showing more and even shooting more, and perhaps I’ll continue this series over time.
If you have a chance, look up the work of these old Hollywood photographers, especially George Hurrell and C. S. Bull. We’re shooting with vastly different technologies, so this series isn’t meant to be an imitation of their work but a contemporary series inspired by the techniques they used on the work they made.
Enormous thanks and a very happy birthday to Elizabeth Quilter who was utterly awesome in this series. Her Dietrich-Wong-Astaire-inspired look breathed life into our session and made it a blast to capture.
And this is only the beginning. With four more sessions yet to show, we’ll have a lot more Golden Age of the Silver Screen coming this winter. And if you’re reading this and you’d like to commission Distant Era to make your own private Golden Age of the Silver Screen session, please don’t hesitate to reach out!
