Stephen Wilkes

This photographer has been shooting an epic project around the world for 10 years. He tells Steve Fairclough the inside story of Day to Night

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The roots of Stephen Wilkes’ Day to Night project lie in a 1996 assignment for Life magazine to shoot the cast and crew of Baz Luhrmann’s movie Romeo + Juliet. He was asked to produce a gatefold-format image, but when he arrived on set in Mexico, he was faced with a square scene. The only solution was to shoot multiple images and create a montage, much like the artist David Hockney had been creating since the early 1980s.

It took approximately 13 more years for digital imaging technology to catch up with Wilkes’ vision for shooting day-to-night images that could tell the passing of time in a single final image, created after shooting over between 1,200 and 2,000 individual images over a period of time. What began as a single 2009 shoot of The High Line for New York magazine has now expanded to a worldwide project that has branched out into the worlds of wildlife and conservation. Nearly 50 of his day-to-night images feature in a new book, which showcases his astonishing work…

What was the genesis of Day to Night?

In 1996 I was asked by Life to create a photograph: a big homage to the great photographs in the magazine called ‘The Big Picture’. They asked me to photograph Baz Luhrmann’s film Romeo + Juliet, with Leonardo DiCaprio and Claire Danes. I went to Mexico City [to shoot it]. Life asked me to create a three- or four-page gatefold panoramic of the entire cast and crew. When I got to Mexico the set was a square, so I was trying to figure out,

“How do I make a square into a panoramic?”