The All Worlds Traveller - The All Worlds Traveller

Welcome aboard 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.

In addition to its function as Distant Era’s news source and blog, the Traveller is about:

Photography and narrative.
History and myth.
Fantasy, science-fiction, and the weird.
Creation and experience.

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.

The Traveller is a place to discuss the context behind the images—what they mean, who made them, how they were made, and why.

It is a space for news relevant to Distant Era, editorial opinion on related topics, and narrative and immersive arts in general—the foundation upon which Distant Era was built, via the multidisciplinary career of its creator.

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.

Whereas Distant Era, represented by the portrait of Athena in profile, shows stories in images, The All Worlds Traveller, bearing the symbol of Pegasus in flight, is all about the words.

Let’s take flight!

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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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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.

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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