Stunt Portraits with Kai Young, Fighter

March 14, 2022
1 min read

Kai Young is an incredible fighter, stunt performer, and friend I’ve had the great pleasure to work with onstage and in Distant Era projects. Goodnatured and kind, with a great sense of humor, he’s an asset to any project he’s part of. Kai was one of four subjects in our fourth Distant Era series, Chicago: November 2019, a Blade Runner tribute and the last official Distant Era series we did prior to the pandemic, and one which I hope to revisit in The All Worlds Traveller later this year.

Kai needed some updated images that showed his form and that he could submit for stunt work (did I mention he’s an incredible fighter?). This is why these portraits aren’t traditional closeup headshots but show more of Kai’s physique. We rolled through a few different lighting and backdrop setups until we were happy with more images than we could ever possibly want. Here are a couple more of our final selections showing off this badass warrior.

It’s always fantastic spending time with Kai. He’s a great model as well as a great fighter (I have mentioned Kai’s a great fighter, right???), so shooting with Kai is easy, awesome, and fun, and I can’t wait to do another Distant Era project with him.

We’ll leave off with a glimpse of Jacob Bates and Kai Young bringing the intensity to our last pre-pandemic project, A Distant Era: Chicago, November 2019.

“Are You a Replicant?”
A Distant Era: Chicago, November 2019, featuring Jacob Bates and Kai Young.

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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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  4. Archival Photography for The Tempest with Idle Muse Theatre Company (Part 1)

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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