W
hen you first see a photo-
graph by Stephen Wilkes
from his “Day To Night”
series—many of which can be seen
in the recently published, beautifully
designed monograph Stephen Wil-
kes: Day To Night—you’ll most likely
experience two disparate sensations.
First, you’ll recognize the setting.
Wilkes and his team have traveled to
some of the world’s most well-known
locations, including the Grand Can-
yon, Paris, Venice and several cel-
ebrated places in New York, includ-
ing the Flatiron Building and Coney
Island. In each image, the landscape
is beautifully captured with vibrant
color and incredible detail.
But as you study the light, you’ll
feel a second sensation, a dissonance
of sorts, that makes you question
the photograph. The impression has
nothing to do with the composition,
per se. But you quickly realize the
photograph, or, more precisely, the
digital composite image isn’t depict-
ing an instant or “decisive moment.”
Instead, Wilkes constructs each
photo by carefully combining and
blending dozens of digital images
together. In doing so, he expands
that moment in each photograph
into a 24-hour segment of time.
Take his image of Coney Island:
On the right, you see the beach cap-
tured in the bright sunlight. But look
at the opposite side, and you notice
the amusement park rides are shot at
night. There’s even motion blur in the
red lights on the Ferris wheel.
The dissonance lasts for only a
moment. But afterward, you look
at the work anew, perhaps not only
rethinking your notions of landscape
photography but also how you create
significant photographs in general. In
other words, if we no longer need to
look for a “decisive moment,” we can
broaden our concept of photography
or, as Wilkes does, meditate on how
we actually see our world.
Wilkes finds this to be particularly
important in this age of social media.
“We live in a world where the act of
seeing has become an endangered
human experience,” says Wilkes.
“I've been a witness to it over the last
10 years, going to these iconic places
where so many people go.” What
Wilkes has noticed is how, for many
people, it’s more important to share an
image of a place on their phone than
to experience it.
But to create the “Day To Night”
photographs, Wilkes must look at
the landscape for 24 or even 36 hours
at a time. So, for Wilkes, creating
each “Day To Night” photo is a form
of meditation.The Concept
But where did the idea of the “Day
To Night” series come from? Wilkes
says three different moments in his life
helped him develop the idea.
The first, a LIFE magazine assign-
ment from the mid-1990s, is intrigu-
ing because the image itself looks so
strikingly different from those in the
“Day To Night” series. It’s also an ana-
log project (shot on film). Neverthe-
less, it’s this project that provided Wil-
kes with the conceptual framework
for the entire series.
“In 1996, I was photographing Baz
Luhrmann’s film ‘Romeo and Juliet,’”
says Wilkes. “And LIFE magazine
asked me to photograph the entire
cast and crew...and the magazine
saw it as a very panoramic kind of
shot.” But when Wilkes arrived on
the set, he saw a problem. “The main
set...was actually square. So, I was
pulling my hair out trying to figure
out how to make a panoramic pho-
tograph out of a square set.” Luckily,
Wilkes remembered David Hock-
ney’s photo-collage technique. Com-
positionally, Wilkes thought, “if I
used that kind of a technique, I couldTop: “High Line,” 2009. This image was
Wilkes’ first photograph of the series,
which was shot for New York magazine.
Bottom: “Coney Island, Brooklyn,” 2011.
This remarkable image of Coney Island is
included in his newly published book, Day
To Night, as well as on the book's cover.
digitalphotopro.com November/December 2019 | 45