One year later, Distant Era returns to the Gala of Everlasting Change, a live action role-playing game set among the fey, to create portraits of its enchanting creatures…
Continuing Distant Era's brand new series, THE PEOPLE OF LIGHT AND SHADOW, an exploration of fey creatures and the denizens of fairytales, with THE VILA…
FOUR YEARS IN THE MAKING: After a global pandemic, production cancelations, and recasting, Distant Era captures final preproduction photos (and a few portraits) for Babes With Blades Theatre Company's 2023 production of…
In which we play with color channels to make the daguerreotype portrait of Zsa Zsa St. James, played with aplomb by Lottie á la West for the Auxientia steampunk fantasy LARP…
This week, we take a look at stylistic daguerreotype portraits of John Kidd as his character Robert Irons in Auxientia, a live action steampunk fantasy role-playing game…
A very special surprise birthday commission with a sweet couple whose engagement I once photographed. And a new, more advanced direction for Distant Era…
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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About a Distant Era
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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