This week, we present the commedia dell'arte portraits of Laughing Stock Theatre's cast for their show, OVER MY DEAD BODY; OR, HOW TO DISTRIBUTE GENERATIONAL WEALTH, directed by Antonio Fava…
Headshot season continues at Distant Era with a new batch for the fabulous Shellie DiSalvo! Longtime readers of The All Worlds Traveller may remember Shellie as “The Morrigan” from Distant Era’s last…
In late March, we made new headshots for Jennifer Mickelson—an actor, intimacy designer, playwright, SAFD Actor-Combatant, and more! Jen's worked with theaters all over Chicago, including Promethean Theatre Ensemble, Citadel Theatre, Broken…
In March, we experimented with an optical spot lighting modifier, trying it out with some of the actors from Idle Muse Theatre Company's production of WHAT THE WEIRD SISTERS SAW. We tried…
In early April Distant Era photographed the archival session for Idle Muse Theatre Company's production of What the Weird Sisters Saw. In this post, we share a selection of color and black-and-white…
In February, professional storyteller Megan Wells did her first Distant Era session, in which we photographed four of the historical women she plays in her work: Abigail Adams, Florence Nightingale, Eleanor Roosevelt,…
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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