JACKSON HOLE, WYO — An obsession with science, a love for photography, and a lot of patience has enabled National Geographic photographer Stephen Wilkes to create a stunning photography exhibit titled Day to Night: In the Field with Stephen Wilkes, on display at the National Museum of Wildlife Art May 24 to August 18, 2019.
“It’s indeed a special honor for me to exhibit my Day to Night series in the National Museum of Wildlife Art. The museum is known for not only its exemplary collection of wildlife art and sculpture, but its unified community, its educational outreach in telling the most important stories of wildlife in America through the magic of art,” Wilkes says.
Generally speaking, photography is a way to record time—specifically, freezing one moment in time. But Wilkes warps time in his work, crafting each Day to Night picture by shooting up to 2,000 images from a fixed-camera angle continuously for up to 36 hours. He then selects approximately 50 of these images and blends them into a final photograph that seamlessly captures one location as it transitions from day to night.
Wilkes’s love of science, and specifically microscopes, is evident in his Day to Night compositions. By combining select moments that occurred throughout the day, he displays hundreds of tiny stories that viewers could have only enjoyed previously by looking at each photograph individually.
And that’s part of the allure.
Wilkes notes that today’s society is increasingly connected to its devices. We believe they connect us to the world, when in reality just might be more disconnected than ever. The intricate detail of these mega-prints encourages people to linger, look slowly, and notice the details. There is so much packed into a single print–each measuring roughly 7 feet tall and 12 feet wide.
Wilkes’s idea of collapsing time in a photograph began in 1996 when LIFE Magazine commissioned a panoramic photograph of the cast and crew of Romeo and Juliet. A panorama was difficult to create, as the room was square.
To get an interesting composition, he took 250 smaller photographs and then manually glued them together to create one huge image. In the center of the image, Claire Danes and Leonardo DiCaprio are looking at each other, but to shoot their reflection in a nearby mirror, Wilkes asked them to kiss.
Presenting these two different moments in one image made Wilkes realize he could use photography to warp time. Years later, technology caught up with Wilkes, and he can now digitally blend moments and time to create the final image.
The avian-themed Day to Night series was formed while Wilkes was on assignment for a National Geographic article in 2017 documenting bird migrations. The exhibition features four bird species: Black-browed Albatrosses in the Falkland Islands; Northern Gannets on Bass Rock, off the coast of Scotland; Sandhill Cranes on Nebraska’s Platte River; and Lesser Flamingos on Kenya’s Lake Bogoria.
Wilkes hopes this exhibition “will inspire everyone, especially young people, to want to learn more about birds. The old adage about the canary in the coal mine is true. If we study and protect birds, they, in turn, can protect and inform us in ways that we are only just beginning to understand,” he says.
Wilkes will be in Jackson to give a public presentation at the National Museum of Wildlife Art for Mix’d Media on Thursday, June 27 at 6pm.
“The exhibits from National Geographic that we’ve hosted in the past have always been enthusiastically received. These exhibitions help us investigate aspects of humanity’s relationship with nature in new and intriguing ways that surprise and educate our guests,” says Museum Curator, Dr. Adam Harris.
