The People of Light and Shadow: The Changeling

…The widow loved her silent, loveless son, but the villagers’ workaday words wormed their way to the root of her heart: “special,” they labeled him as a child, “strange” as a youth, and now “deviant” as he approached adulthood. So the day before his sixteenth birthday the widow took the boy into the old forest and climbed the hill topped with the crown of standing stones that was said to be a faery mound. Under a full moon, she whispered the pagan prayer her great grandmother used to chant when thunder muttered on windy nights, and then from the silver-moonlit mist, a faery appeared.

Night-blue butterflies perched upon the eight points of his antlers, and his clothes were elf-made, from cobwebs and cat’s breath, and he stared at the widow with eyes like limpid pools.

“You stole my true son,” the widow said. She placed her hand upon the shoulder of the strange, cold boy she had raised. “This is your changeling child, which you fashioned from a cord of wood and swapped for my infant son while he lay in his cradle. I pray you tell me: What has become of my own true boy?”

The faery spoke no words, but with a wave of his hand he bade the widow follow him to a clearing in the wood, where a young man identical to her loveless faery child cavorted in the moonlight, face aglow in the joy of the dance, his only clothing a golden wreath of autumn leaves and a cloud of the same blue butterflies. The widow wept to see her own true son, wild as the beasts of the wood, untamable, exuberant.

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“The Cooper’s Widow’s Son”

Introducing The People of Light and Shadow

The People of Light and Shadow is a new fine art portrait series from Distant Era focused on the fey, faerie creatures, and the denizens of fairy tales. Our fifth official series, The People of Light and Shadow will continue over the following months with new portraits in the series every week. It is the first such fine art series conceptualized and produced by Distant Era since our fourth, Chicago: November 2019 (which is both the title of a series and the date it was produced).

The Changeling: Gary Henderson

Actor Gary Henderson is a Distant Era veteran, having first appeared in our third series, Hauntings from a Distant Era, in October 2019. As soon as we pitched the series, Gary responded with an idea for a changeling—a human child taken to live with the fey, like the child Titania and Oberon fight over in Shakespeare’s A Midsummer Night’s Dream. Gary said he wanted the changeling to be shirtless, wearing a kind of crown, and covered in butterflies. What a phenomenal way to begin.

Gary isn’t just a talented actor but a creative and industrious thinker and inventor. He is a blessing to have on set, even acting as a grip sometimes out of the goodness of his heart. Gary created his entire look and makeup. He printed each and every one of the butterflies, and then he cut them out by hand and put them together. Gary set the bar for the kinds of portraits we were going to produce for this series, and his work and creative energy inspired all of us to do our best work. Here’s a behind-the-scenes gallery of Distant Era MVP Elizabeth glueing the butterflies to Gary’s body.

Photography

Being The People of Light and Shadow, we tried to keep the lighting specific in order to make areas of, well, light and shadow. This meant placing Gary away from the background, though lighting an area of it, and lighting the beautiful leaf crown; for the main light, we switched between a narrow strip of light and a smaller, harder light from the beauty dish (grids attached in either case to focus the light). V-flats reflected stray light on the sides. The background was a simple, textured “latte-colored” backdrop. The image was shot at f/4, ISO 100, 85 mm, 1/200 sec.

As we landed at our final image (and consequently “chosen”) portrait for this look, Elizabeth snapped a picture of us looking at the monitor, with Garrus the cat sleeping in the background. This began a “final review” tradition for The People of Light and Shadow series, which returning viewers will see in weeks to come.

In the meantime, here is a selection of other images from the session.

The Story Text and Series Inspiration

The story text at the top was written by me, Steven Townshend, as one interpretation of the portrait. I used to write about the fey frequently for Dungeons & Dragons in a bygone age and have always loved the subject matter and style. In my early years of digital photography, I enjoyed capturing the fey creatures at the Bristol Renaissance Faire. The style of Peter S. Beagle’s prose in The Last Unicorn still astounds me, especially the opening paragraph, and that novel and Stardust, by Neil Gaiman, are among my all-time favorites. Thus, in returning to creating a photography series after a long time away, I’m beginning in a comfortable, familiar, and much beloved source of inspiration. Week to week, I’m excited to reveal what’s next.