Stephen Wilkes // Day To Night

If you were to stand in one spot at an iconic location for 30 hours and simply observe, never closing your eyes, you still wouldn’t be able to take in all the detail and emotion found in a Stephen Wilkes panoramic photograph. Not only does Wilkes shoot over 1,500 exposures from a fixed angle, he also distills this visual information afterward in his studio, painstakingly composing selected frames into a single image.

Day to Night presents 60 epic panoramas created between 2009 and 2018, shot everywhere from Africa’s Serengeti to the Champs-Élysées in Paris, from the Grand Canyon to Coney Island, from Trafalgar Square to Red Square. Each composition is a labor of love as well as patience. Wilkes waited more than two years to gain permission to photograph Pope Francis celebrating Easter mass in the Vatican, ultimately producing a vivid tableau in which the pontiff appears 10 times.

The book also features extraordinary details—works of art in their own right that highlight the stories contained within each image. A bride makes her way through Central Park; in Tanzania, zebras gather around a near-invisible watering hole during a drought; in Rio de Janeiro, surfers come and go while a man holds a sign reading “No more than two questions per customer.” “It is exactly these small stories, these details, that draw people into the photographs,” says Wilkes. Once discovered, these mini narratives lend each composition a personal, candid feel.

This collection takes us on a seamless trip from dawn to dark across the world’s most iconic locations, unveiling the unique ebb and flow of man-made and natural landmarks like never before.

The photographer
Stephen Wilkes’s work has appeared in Vanity Fair, Time, Fortune, National Geographic, Sports Illustrated, in campaigns for Nike, American Express, Sony, and Rolex, and is included in the collections of the Houston Museum of Fine Arts, Museum of the City of New York, 9/11 Memorial Museum and many more. Wilkes awards and honors include the Alfred Eisenstaedt Award for Magazine Photography and TIME Magazine Top 10 Photographs of 2012.

The author
Lyle Rexer is a New York–based writer, curator, and art critic. He is a contributor to Photograph magazine, and has written for many others including Art in America, Aperture, and Modern Painters. His books include The Edge of Vision: The Rise of Abstraction in Photography and How to Look at Outsider Art. A Rhodes scholar, he serves on the faculty at School of Visual Arts in New York City.