Essentially what I’m doing is layering specific moments over the course of a day, but many of those moments are emptier with not as many people in them, so it gives me the ability to create a background plate and take the best moments based on time and put them together seamlessly. I actually get to rediscover my photos in some way through the editing process.Īs I edit, I begin to establish where day begins and night ends, and that’s where I start to build what I call the 'master plate.' I create a photograph based on the time vector, which can be on an X, Y or Z axis, and the final photo is created along that axis. I shoot such broad frames that things I focused on initially, that I loved in the moment, I will later find that there might be other moments I’m missing. Once I’m back at my studio, the editing process can take months. I also have certain moments in my mind that are going to be central in terms of the narrative of that final photo. The 1,000 or so images are just specific moments, but I usually have a pretty good idea once the last image is taken of how time will move in the final photograph. What is your process like once you’ve snapped the last image? You photograph more than 1,000 single images to make one final photograph. Wilkes spoke to Smithsonian magazine about his artistic process and how creating images that manipulate time and space offers a new take on how we view the world around us. (The book release coincides with 'A Witness to Change,' a photographic exhibition to be held at Bryce Wolkowitz Gallery in New York City beginning September 12.) Time-lapse photos these are not, as Wilkes carefully selects the exact frames he'll compile into the final image. Wilkes expands on this concept in his new book, Day to Night, which features panoramas of iconic places like New York's Coney Island, Moscow's Red Square and Arizona's Grand Canyon seen over the course of a day. Technology has given me additional megapixels that allow me to include things that used to be insignificant, making story telling that much deeper and richer.' create as much depth and peripheral vision as possible, like you’re looking through a window. 'I'm focused on h ow the eye sees and the scale in which we see the world. 'I’m interested in creating images that resonate with the way we actually see the world,' Wilkes says. The painstaking task of editing all of this information and whittling it down into one image can take months to complete, but the results capture a sense of place that can't be expressed by a single frame alone. It is only upon closer inspection that viewers discover that each of his works is actually the result of shooting thousands of photographs from a stationary position over the course of a day and stitching them together digitally to create one cohesive panorama. At first glance, Stephen Wilkes' photographs look like a single moment in time.

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