single image in Stephen Wilkes’s “Day to Night” series is composed of an average of 1,500 frames captured by manual shutter clicks over a period of anywhere from 16 to 30 hours. During this process, Wilkes must keep his horizon line straight and maintain continuity, which means keeping his camera perfectly still.
In a new book, “From Darkroom to Daylight,” Harvey Wang interviews fellow-photographers and other renowned photo-world professionals about their experiences navigating technological changes in the medium. Some, such as Sally Mann, have continued to rely on early photographic processes; others, such as Stephen Wilkes, have eagerly embraced the possibilities of digital. Below are excerpts from Wang’s conversations with those and other artists, accompanied by images that embody each of their photographic practices. The aim in initiating these dialogues, Wang writes in the book’s introduction, is to find out “if other photographers’ worlds were turned upside down when they stopped mixing chemicals and isolating themselves in the dark.”
I see a lot out there and what I see is people who have talent and work hard…or think they work hard…but the priority they need to get to that special place is going to escape them. They don’t understand that the level of passion and drive that you have to have to be really successful in this business today is amplified. Everybody has a camera and it’s incredible who you’re competing with. So my advice is something Jay Maisel once told me, “You gotta eat, sleep, breathe and drink it. And if you don’t do that, find something else to do!”
Stephen Wilkes is not about that single moment, not exactly. He is, rather, a collector of moments, staking out a location until he has hoovered up enough of them to tell the story of a single place. At first, the panoramas in Day to Night can throw you, as if your brain briefly went off-kilter. Is that a storm closing in fast? Or an eclipse hovering just below the clouds? The reality is altogether more ordinary and yet somehow more striking: day and night—together. These are not the briefest of moments. They are many moments, as many as possible, collapsed and fused into one.
As Sandy drew near, TIME asked five photographers — Michael Christopher Brown, Benjamin Lowy, Ed Kashi, Andrew Quilty and Stephen Wilkes — to document the hurricane and its aftermath via Instagram.
Still Images In Great Advertising, is a column where Suzanne Sease discovers great advertising images and then speaks with the photographers about it. I have been in this business for many years and I been familiar with Stephen Wilkes for years, okay deca
Photographer Stephen Wilkes really understands New York City. His amazing day-to-night images, taking a minimum of 10 hours to create from the same perspective, will be on exhibition at the Clamp Art Gallery in New York Ciy from September 8th through Octo
His amazing day-to-night images, taking a minimum of 10 hours to create from the same perspective, will be on exhibition at the Clamp Art Gallery in New York Ciy from September 8th through October 29th