Northlight Gala 2023

October 9, 2023
1 min read

Thanks to a referral from photographer Greg Inda, Distant Era had the incredible opportunity to photograph the Northlight Theatre Gala 2023, held at the Chicago Botanic Garden in Glencoe, IL. Greg and I have been shooting together since our first digital photography class in 2007, and he’s photographed Northlight’s gala in the past.

Northlight Theatre

Northlight is one of the largest nonprofit theaters in the Chicago area and one of the theaters I first visited in my early years in Chicago in the late ’90s and early ’00s. In 2018, I accompanied Greg Inda as an assistant on his preproduction/promotional shoot for Northlight’s Nina Simone: Four Women. As a narrative photographer I’d always hoped to shoot for Northlight one day, so I’m exceedingly grateful to Greg for the referral. I’m also grateful to the Northlight staff for their exceptional communication, organization, and kindness, all of which were simply above and beyond. Abundant thanks to Athena, Mara, Annabelle, and artistic director BJ Jones for their time and attention to detail.

Company photo from the 2023 Northlight Gala at the Chicago Botanic Garden.

Chicago Botanic Garden

There are some things you never get around to when you live in a place. In spite of having landed here in 1997, I finally saw a Chicago Architecture Boat Tour in 2012; visited the top of the Hancock Tower in 2014; and, thanks to the gala, at last made it to the Chicago Botanic Garden in 2023.

Serendipitously, I’d planned to go to the Chicago Botanic Garden as research for a prose project I’d worked on since August but hadn’t had time. Thanks to the Northlight Gala, I was able to accomplish two objectives at once. Seeing the gardens was not only helpful for the project, but now they’re within my compass. Not to mention extraordinarily beautiful. I look forward to visiting them intentionally and regularly from now on.

The Event

I began photography with the Northlight company photo before roving the cocktail hour held in the beautiful bonsai garden. After that, dinner was hosted by Karen Jordan and her husband Christian Farr, broadcast journalists for ABC and NBC respectively, as well as dining editor Julie Chernoff, with music by Matt and Andrew Mueller. After presentations, an auction, and digital frames in the thousands, the hour had grown late, and it was time to pack up.

A tiny glimpse of the event. For more, check out the Northlight Gala 2023 page.

Meaningful Work

Having begun my career as an actor in Chicago, theatre still remains closest to my heart. It’s one of the pillars of the work that Distant Era creates. Thanks once more to Northlight and to Greg for the opportunity. It was a wonderful evening, and I was honored to take part in it.

Check out Northlight’s photo selections for the event on their gala 2023 page!

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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.

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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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