BY NORMAN BORDEN | Imagine if you could actually see the passage of time — the transition from dawn to dark — in one photograph. Fine art photographer Stephen Wilkes has accomplished just that in his remarkable series of 18 large format images called “Day to Night.”
For the past six years, Wilkes has been making panoramic photographs of iconic cityscapes, landscapes and historical events such as Times Square, Tanzania’s Serengeti National Park and President Obama’s 2013 Inauguration, respectively.
Normally perched 50 feet above the street in a cherry picker [crane], he takes up to 1,500 pictures from one camera angle over 12 to 15 consecutive hours. Then, back in his studio, he digitally blends about 50 of those pictures into a single image.
The result: half of the picture shows the scene in broad daylight while the other half shows it at night, with glimpses of life’s little moments throughout. For example, in the print of the Macy’s Thanksgiving Day Parade, it seems as if the Fireman, Spider-Man and SpongeBob balloons are on an improbable collision course in Columbus Circle. They’re heading toward oncoming cars and taxis that have their headlights on — because for them, it’s night. The other details, with Central Park and the skyline divided by day and night, are mesmerizing.
Wilkes says, “I discovered that being 50 feet above the street is the point where you begin to see the energy of New York…it’s almost like when you scuba dive and put your hand into a school of fish. They react as if they’re a single unit rather than as individuals — it’s emergent behavior. I see the same thing when I get above New York and other cities…there’s an ebb and flow of activity, a form of emergence. It’s an exciting thing to study and see how it translates all over the world.”
The Times Square picture was one of the most challenging for Wilkes. He explains, “Whenever I do these pictures, I have to think about the transitions as time changes. Do I have all the visual material? For every moment with people, I need a moment without them. So when I’m shooting a place as busy as Times Square, I need to pay attention to what’s going on. But what happened on that July day was crazy. There’d been a bomb scare, so the police suddenly stopped traffic and cleared the streets within three minutes. I kept photographing because in closing the streets, the cops had given me the place where I had nobody in the scene, and that allowed me to create a checkerboard scene of time. Wherever you see shadow, it’s night, and where there’s light, it’s day. If not for that bomb scare, the picture I would have gotten probably wouldn’t have been as exciting.”
During the first five years that Wilkes spent photographing “Day to Night,” he concentrated mainly on taking pictures of well-known cityscapes. Lately, he’s gone back to nature to capture the magnificent beauty of landscapes. He’s done just that with his stunning image of Serengeti National Park in Tanzania. After a three-week vacation in Africa, Wilkes went to the Serengeti to photograph the largest migration of mammals in the world. Witnessing something like that, he says, was a life-changing experience.
The photographer explains, “When my wife and I got there, we realized there was a five-week drought going on. It was interesting to see how it was affecting the animals…I found one watering hole along the river and after studying it for several days, got permission to go off-road and photograph it. I went in there at about 2 a.m. Using a flatbed truck, we built an 18-foot high platform attached to a crocodile blind that had a 20×24″ window. I was in that space for 26 hours with my assistant, and took two hours for lunch. What we saw in those 26 hours was one of the most amazing experiences of my life.”
Adding to the experience, Wilkes says that this was the first picture in the series that actually bridged many of the social issues most important to him: rising seas and climate change. And with water so scarce, it was amazing to spend 26 hours watching how these competitive species shared the water without so much as a grunt between them. He observes, “They’ll fight over a dead animal in the grass — but when it came to water, everybody had to share. The animals have it figured out.”
The drought actually worked in Wilkes’s favor, since it forced the animals to drink in a specific area.
“I was able to capture this very powerful narrative of animals during the day and night,” he says. “I think the fact that I was in a crocodile blind and had immersed myself there for a long time let the animals accept the fact that I was a fixture.”
When asked why he spent 26 hours instead of the usual 15-hour shift: “I stayed there because of the moonlight…that can be a one hour exposure in itself. We photographed the stars, but the main thing is to get the detail from the moonlight, and sometimes you have to wait till the moon gets to a certain height in the sky to get the beautiful light and details.” And there are amazing details, from the stars to the baby elephant and zebra, to the papa (or mama) elephant in the foreground, wildebeests in the background, and more. It’s quite a story.
At this point in the series, Wilkes is excited that he is merging history into his work with the image of Obama’s inauguration and Jerusalem’s Western Wall. Now the pictures are also speaking to conservation and nature. “They do it in a way that is enlightening and that is very gratifying,” he says. Wilkes hopes to go to Brazil and Russia, and is scheduled to photograph the Brooklyn Bridge next spring.
“One of the things I love about this project is that it’s essentially everything I love about the medium of photography and the things I’ve been drawn to since I was a kid. It’s exciting to be able to put a face on time.”
“Day to Night” is on view through Jan. 9, 2016 at Bryce Wolkowitz Gallery (505 W. 24th St., btw. 10th & 11th Aves.). Hours: Tues.–Sat., 10 a.m.–6 p.m. Call 212-243-8830 or visit brycewolkowitz.com. Artist info at stephenwilkes.com.
