This week, Distant Era time travels back to the late twentieth century with another of storyteller Megan Wells’s historical impersonations, in which she characterizes Diana, Princess of Wales, popularly known as Princess Diana.
Consequently, we’re also time traveling back to August 2024 when this photograph was made and the final shoot with my first professional camera.
But first, allow me to reintroduce Megan Wells for anyone reading her name for the first time, as well as the project we embarked on in 2024.
Storyteller Megan Wells
Megan tells stories. Not just tells. Megan expresses stories with her whole self. When she’s in costume playing a character, Megan encompasses the story. She is the story. The story is the character that Megan’s speaking through. If I struggle with words to express what Megan does, it’s because like theatre it cannot be accurately expressed in summary but must be experienced live to understand the powers, the skill, the craft of the performance.
In Megan’s historical impersonations, she brings women from the past into the here and now. In a manner of speaking, Megan and Distant Era share the same goal, which makes us well aligned for this kind of project.
The Work
Megan first learned of Distant Era’s work when I photographed new portraits for my close friend (and roommate for my first thirteen years in Chicago), storyteller Joshua Safford. In early 2024, Megan and I set out to create a series of Distant Era portraits to show her as the characters she plays. Over the first eight months of 2024, we made portraits for Abigail Adams, Florence Nightingale, Eleanor Roosevelt, Mary Magdalene, Nannerl Mozart, Clara Barton, Miep Gies, Mary Shelley, and Princess Diana.
The purpose of our project is not only to make promotional images for Megan’s work but to create a legacy for Megan.
Diana, Princess of Wales
Over the course of our series, we’ve worked to distinguish each portrait from the last. We’ve employed a few consistent devices in the portraits, using historical signatures where we can get them, for instance.
For Diana, Megan suggested we do something unlike anything we had done previously. She wanted to show Diana breaking from conformity. This was largely experimental during the session. We considered (and photographed) some horizontal portraits. Eventually, we decided on the portrait above, which breaks the conventions of the series:
- It’s our most photographic and least painterly portrait.
- It’s our simplest background, flat black.
- It’s our first head-to-toe portrait.
- Diana leans casually on a royal purple and gold support.
- She has one shoe on and the other partly off.
- Her expression is whimsical.
- Her signature is written large in gold marker across the photo at an angle, front and center, like an autograph.
The Session
This session, which also included Mary Shelley and a friendly Megan-the-storyteller portrait, was the final voyage for my trusty Canon 5D Mark IV, the first truly professional camera I owned and the device upon which I photographed all Distant Era’s series through Gods and Heroes of the Aegean. A week or so after this session, I began shooting with my (mirrorless) Canon R5 Mark II.
The significance is mostly sentimental. The new camera has opened up new opportunities for learning and growth, and my results are more accurate, which yields a greater number of useable photos.
We finished our session with me standing on a ladder photographing Diana from above, among of our favorite shots from the session.
For a time the series took a pause, but we returned in February 2025 for Elizabeth Hamilton, who I’ll show soon, and we have Helen Keller coming up in the next few weeks!
