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.