Something Old, Something New

This winter, Distant Era is time traveling back to the time of big studios, big films, and big stars in a series we’re calling Golden Age of the Silver Screen.

We’re developing this series alongside Gods and Heroes of the Aegean, our compositing series about the Greek myths.

This first image was unscientifically chosen from our test run of photos yesterday. I always neglect to include BTS photos, so here is an unglamorous look at the disaster area where this photo was made. Look at all those paints (not being used) behind the background, table shoved off in the corner, gaff tape on the floors. Hopefully the result belies the setup.

Our first session featured Distant Era MVP Elizabeth, patiently helping test the lights and levels.

I’ll leave it here for now with that first taste. We’ll share more as we get the series underway.

Time travel is pretty affordable these days: If you’re yearning to travel back in time for a glamorous session, we’d love to guide you on your way!

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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.