Portraits from a Distant Era

“The Lady of the Midsummer Faire: parsley, sage, rosemary, and thyme entwined among the tresses of her long and lustrous hair.”

Perhaps the simplest of the Distant Era series, Portraits from a Distant Era was shot in one afternoon with ten subjects and has remained a touchstone for the kind of work that we do. Up until that series, the ideas were nebulous, having evolved from shooting theatre, events, and weekend practice photoshoots with friends who enlisted me to photograph their concepts. Distant Era’s second series (shot one month after wrapping Urban Fantasy), the goal was to create old fashioned portraits of characters in a “classic” style. Scare quotes on “classic” because that word can mean so many different things as to be a virtually meaningless descriptor. But really, I wanted to realize the vision I had had for an old fashioned headshot way back in 2015 when shooting Babes With Blades’s Joining Sword and Pen image.

The Lady of the Faire

The many-talented Jennifer Mohr was the subject of this image, currently the first image that greets visitors to the Distant Era website. Jen is one of my most-photographed subjects, and she last appeared here on the All Worlds Traveller as Captain America back in January. As I recall, she felt a little anxious about this session because she hadn’t done any makeup and just presented herself as she was. Clearly she didn’t need anything extra, and her natural self shines radiantly through in the image. I love the authenticity of her expression, the hint of wistfulness in her eyes. The first job I ever loved was my role as a performer at the Renaissance faire (in Ohio) when I was seventeen. Jen performed at the Bristol faire for several years, and I think this image is special to me because of the way her expression, costume, and garland recall those late summer days of music, romance, laughter, dance, and friendship. She looks back, almost over her shoulder, the direction I look back on those long ago days.

A Second Look

While preparing to print the images this year as studio samples, I noticed some editing mistakes. In particular, I noticed many places in the images where the contrast is too intense, where parts of the images are completely black, and all detail has been lost in those shadow areas. While the images looked great on the canvas prints I gave to all the models in this session, I don’t think they would look good on a fine art stock. Thus, I have taken to reediting the photos so that they will make acceptable prints. Notice how dark and contrasty version one appears, and then as the slider moves to the left, the colors come back into the subject’s face, eyes, and hair. (I also took a moment to tone down bright spots on the subject’s shoulder and cheek, initial editing errors that had always bugged me.)

I have mixed feelings about editing this series, since the work was “finished” in 2019, so my goal is simply to fix errors that would affect my capacity to display them, tweaking things only where necessary.

In the coming weeks, I’ll reintroduce this favorite series with better-balanced versions while editing some new client images and planning a brand new personal series shooting in the late summer and early fall…

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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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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.

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.