Growth and Gratitude in 2022

December 26, 2022
1 min read

Happy holidays and a very happy New Year to you, however you find yourself here on in the pages of The All Worlds Traveller. One year ago, I summarized the brief history of Distant Era. That post concluded in a section titled “Future Goals, Present Gratitude.” It began:

For various reasons, Distant Era has sometimes seemed more like a weird art project than a portrait business. That will change behind the scenes, but the art projects will still come along, each with their goals grounded in what I can learn from them to grow Distant Era and to grow personally and professionally as well.

Distant Era Year in Review, 2019–Present

It happened. In 2022, Distant Era was more than a weird art project. As theaters and performance spaces reopened, we began to create photographs for shows again, as well as for individual performers and companies. We ran portraiture modeling workshops and game photography workshops at Gen Con. We brought portraiture to some live action role-playing game events. And we completed the weird art project we were working on, The People of Light and Shadow. It was a busy year.

I crawled into December after that busy year, desperate to catch my breath, gather my thoughts, recover my from long hours in the editing chair, and unplug for a time. Nearly there. Soon we’ll create some new wonders. Soon, we’ll update the Distant Era site with new work. Come January, we’ll look to the future again.

Many Thanks

I am grateful to all of you who have found your way here and taken a look at Distant Era’s works and offered a little conversation or a nod of approval. That’s meant everything. It’s been wonderful to hear from you.

I’m likewise grateful to all those who have hired Distant Era over the past year. Each and every one of our collaborations has been a joy.

I am grateful to everyone who’s put themselves in front of my camera. Thank you for your courage and your willingness to let go, play, and try new things. It’s not an easy thing to do. You have all been magnificent.

For the dear ones we lost this year, I am grateful for our time together and the many things you taught me. I miss you and think of you every day.

A very happy New Year to one and all—may peace and prosperity be yours in the year to come.

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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. Testing a New Camera at the Bristol Renaissance Faire
  2. Archival Photography for The Tempest with Idle Muse Theatre Company (Part 3): Lighting and Scenes
  3. Archival Photography for The Tempest with Idle Muse Theatre Company (Part 2): Costumes
  4. Greetings from the UK

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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