Gratitude 2023

November 27, 2023
1 min read

As Thanksgiving week passes, I contemplate the year that comes to a close and the one that approaches. It’s easy to fixate on mistakes of the past and apprehensions about the future. Instead, I’ll focus on present gratitude.

We had so many new and interesting clients this year, from international soccer stars to artistic bookmakers to magicians to filmmakers to actors and cosplayers. Distant Era had the opportunity to create work for a wide variety of wonderful clients.

The longstanding relationships with Chicago theatre companies produced new work in portraiture and performance photography. In addition, I had the opportunity to photograph theaters I’d never worked with before.

I am especially grateful for the community of photographers I’ve had the good fortune to interact with this year, both in Chicago and abroad. Conversations with them have made the work less lonely, and seeing their work inspires me.

A thousand thanks to those who have stopped by to comment on social media posts featuring articles in The All Worlds Traveller. It’s encouraging to know that there’s someone out there.

A sizable portion of my professional work this year involved building role-playing game experiences for people of all ages, and coaching narrative craft, and making books, and I’m grateful for these opportunities. I’m also thankful for the small gatherings of talented storytellers that gather in my neighborhood to flex our narrative and character skills. I’m grateful for my traveling companions and collaborators throughout the year.

And I’m grateful for Elizabeth’s assistance on the many sessions we’ve done over the course of the year.

Gratitude for One and All

The lists above are necessarily general, as truly, I’m grateful to so many people that making a list is too difficult, and certain to exclude too many important people that bear mentioning, and it seems almost everyone I’ve come into contact with bears mentioning! Suffice it to say, if we’ve had a conversation over the past year—if you’ve hired me or I’ve hired you, or we’ve collaborated or had a deep conversation—you have my abiding gratitude. Yet I will do my best to express my thanks personally in the time to come.

Here are just a few of the moments from the last year that I’m grateful for (so far!)

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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.

  1. Practicing Patience with Personal Projects
  2. A Bright Room Called Day, with Blank Theatre Company
  3. Changes
  4. Alone at Last, with Laughing Stock

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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