take the square and open it up into a
horizontal [rectangular] shape.”
Additionally, he realized that he could
“bend” or “move” time if he shot this
way. “I had Claire Danes and Leonardo
DiCaprio in the center of the image,”
says Wilkes. “And they were embracing.
But as I panned my camera to the right,
there was a huge 25-foot-tall mirror
on the set, which reflected Danes and
DiCaprio and the whole cast and crew.
So I said, ‘Everybody stay exactly as you
are for this picture, except Claire and
Leonardo. I need you to kiss for this one
photograph.’ And so they kissed. And I
came back to New York, and I put this
entire collage of 250 images together by
hand, which took me about a week.”
Then, he says, he stood there for a
while just looking at it and taking it
all in. “I remember being in my studio
and saying to myself, ‘That is so cool.
I’m changing time in a photograph,’”
says Wilkes.
But to take this photo collage fur-
ther, Wilkes would need to wait years,
for computer processing power, camera
technology and Photoshop to catch up
with his vision in order to seamlessly
merge all the still photos together.
In 2009, the second moment occurred:
For this assignment, he was asked to
shoot the High Line, which is an ele-
vated linear park created from a former
New York Central Railroad line on the
west side of Manhattan, for New York
magazine. “I knew about the High Line,
and I started to study it to make this pic-
ture. I soon discovered that it has
this unique perspective on New
York, one that’s both intimate
with the street and yet you could
look up into the windows and
buildings and see people.”
It dawned on Wilkes that the
point of view reminded him of
a painting by the Dutch Renais-
sance painter Pieter Bruegel the
Elder called “The Harvesters,”
which is a canvas in the collection
of the Metropolitan Museum of
Art, also in New York. It’s a work of art
the photographer had seen as a teenager,
which would be the third moment, or
memory, that helped him discover the
“Day To Night” series.
In the monograph, Wilkes points out
that Bruegel’s painting has a very simi-
lar elevated point of view to the High
Line. In it, Bruegel depicts a group of
people working in a wheat field. That
canvas, says Wilkes, influenced the aes-
thetic of his own digital series of land-
scape photographs. “Everything in the
painting has something to say,” Wilkes
says in the book. “The painter was able
to control the intimacy and breadth.”
He also says that the artist seems to use
the same figures in the background as
in the foreground, as if Bruegel himself
is bending time.
There’s also a pragmatic, compo-
sitional reason Wilkes employs anelevated viewpoint for his series: “From
a perspective standpoint, when you get
higher in elevation, your foreground,
middle ground and background
expands. And you’re able to have more
depth in it. That’s something that’s
very important to me.” Wilkes says
that expanding each section allows him
flexibility when compositing images
from different times of the day.
It was while he was scouting for the
right location and time to shoot the
High Line that Wilkes had the actual
epiphany of creating the “Day To Night”
idea. “While I scouted from rooftops
and buildings...I kept falling in love
with this idea of how it changed over
time,” he says. For instance, he enjoyed
watching how, in the early morninglight, “people were running and doing
things, and then by lunchtime there
were people eating... Then, at night, it
was really kind of spooky. Honestly, I
was having trouble deciding which time
of day I like most.”
So he figured he would try to include
the whole day in one image!
That’s essentially what he said during
a somewhat perplexing phone call he
had with the New York magazine photo
editor. During that call, those three dis-
parate moments, or memories—the
Bruegel painting, the LIFE magazine
photo collage and the High Line’s van-
tage point—came together in Wilkes’
mind as he suggested he shoot the New
York assignment in “a day-to-night/
north-to-south” style.
The baffled photo editor simply
replied, “What are you talking about?”
Wilkes laughed as he admitted to herTop: “Grizzly Bears at Bella Coola Valley,
British Columbia, Canada,” 2018.
Bottom: “Serengeti National Park,” 2015.
While I scouted
from rooftops and
buildings...I kept
falling in love with
this idea of how it
changed over time.
digitalphotopro.com November/December 2019 | 47