The Banshee

September 13, 2021
2 mins read

The Undying Widow, the Banshee Ghost, the Rasping Whisperer of the Midnight Halls…

The final image in the Portraits from a Distant Era series is one that heralds the next series we would do, Hauntings from a Distant Era, photographed in October 2019.

The subject is Birch House Immersive co-creator Lauren Fields, seen previously in Distant Era’s premiere Urban Fantasy series—she is one of my favorite artistic collaborators. Not only does Lauren create exciting and brilliant immersive work, but as part of Birch House Immersive she actively supports other artists by creating workshops and artist residencies—both in person and online—to help artists create and grow their own work. It can be a hard world out there for the artists: constant rejection, low pay, intense competition, multiple jobs, predatory producers, a constant hustle, limited access to healthcare, the petty jealousies and egos of artist frenemies… The list goes on. An artistic director in the community who offers a helping hand, a listening ear, and an authentic voice in support of fellow artists is a rare and special person indeed. 

But aside from all those great qualities, Lauren is my go-to resource for all things spooky and macabre. I had photographed her as at least two or three different witch characters prior to the first Distant Era series, so it came as little surprise when Lauren arrived at the Portraits from a Distant Era series as a creepy banshee-like character in a dark veil.

Curation

When I had originally selected Lauren’s image for this series, I chose the one in the top row, center, in the gallery below. Something about the way the character was turned away from the viewer, the indistinct profile of the face beneath the veil, and the flexing fingers of the hand creeped me out. I chose that image as my selection for Lauren, put it out to the world, and moved on to the next subject’s portrait. But as the selections for the series continued to come together week to week, I was less and less satisfied with that image. All the other subjects in the series faced the viewer. Most of the other images in the series were warm in tone, while this image was a desaturated sepia tone that looked closer a nineteenth-century photograph than a painterly portrait. I considered whether that was ok, but it continued to bother me because it just didn’t feel right, and not in the fun, unsettling way evoked by the content—in retrospect it wasn’t the right pick for the series. 

By the time I finished choosing and editing the rest of the images, it was nearly October, and I was thinking of doing a spooky series, also featuring Lauren. But that image was still bugging me. So I went back through the images and selected one that matched the posing style of the other portraits. I used a similar desaturated sepia look, but it felt much more like it belonged with the others. And yet, while technically part of the Portraits series, I tend to group it with the Hauntings series that followed immediately after. 

The other looks in the gallery below show ways in which the veil distorted Lauren’s face in ways that made her character seem mysterious, strange, and unsettling. 

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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.

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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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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