Return to the Gala of Everlasting Change

September 25, 2023
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1 min read

Last weekend, I photographed portraits at the Gala of Everlasting Change live action role-play event in Yorkville, Illinois. Work on those portraits will begin shortly, and I look forward to sharing them this fall as I complete them. Since I arrived at the event early, I volunteered to take a few quick group shots of the different fey courts outdoors, which I’ll share at the end of this post. 

Busy Busy

I arrived at the event after an early morning shoot with photographer Greg Inda for the American Heart Association’s Heart Walk. Greg enlisted me to help him cover the two-day event, which took place in downtown Chicago on Friday, September 22, and in Wheaton, IL, on Saturday, September 23. So, by the time I arrived at the gala in Yorkville, I’d already been shooting informal groups of people all day. The previous week, after photographing and turning over (and seeing!) Idle Muse Theatre Company’s production of Jane: Abortion and the Underground, I traveled to Ohio and back in a day to attend (and photograph!) my high school reunion. Meanwhile, I made headway on a few other outstanding freelance projects… There’s a lot going on.

The Gala

One of the best things about the gala is that my only job there is to make beautiful portraits for clients. I’ll have more to say about the gala and the subjects as I work on the individual portraits. For the curious, I wrote about it a bunch last year. Here’s what some of last year’s portraits looked like.

Some of the portraits from the Gala of Everlasting Change 2022.

In the photographs below, you see can see the four fairy courts—autumn, spring, summer, and winter, as well as the unaligned fey. I look forward to featuring some of these characters once the portraits start coming out!

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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. What the Weird Sisters Saw, Archival Session
  2. Megan Wells as Maria Anna (Nannerl) Mozart
  3. Journey to the Eclipse, 2024
  4. Megan Wells as Mary Magdalene

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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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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