Stephen Wilkes’ Incredible Cityscapes Span Day to Night

5 minute read

The very idea of a photograph is that it captures a single moment. One click of the shutter renders the briefest sliver of time permanent. Everything before and everything after might as well not have happened at all.

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.

The locations are often familiar. Wilkes says he’s drawn to places that are part of our collective memory, iconic and instantly recognizable, like Times Square and the Washington Mall. It also helps if he can get a cherry picker there.

50 feet up above the National Mall, Stephen Wilkes waits for the sun to break through the clouds as the mall fills with people during the Presidential Inauguration 2013.Alex Abdalian

For the shoots, Wilkes wakes before dawn and often uses a crane to get at least 50 ft. (15 m) above his subjects. He takes the first pictures by daybreak. He’ll have shot 1,200 to 1,500 more by the time he wraps up 12 to 15 hours later. About 50 make it into the final photograph, an editing process that can take months. While he’s shooting, there are no bathroom breaks. Meals, if he decides to eat at all, are brought up in a bucket. And for every picture he takes, he has to capture the same space without anyone in it. That vacant shot becomes what Wilkes calls “the naked plate” on which he overlays details from all the other images. “It’s like a Rubik’s Cube in real time in my brain,” Wilkes says.

Wilkes got the idea of overlapping dozens of images of one location over an extended period from two earlier projects: a five-year photographic study of Ellis Island’s empty rooms and a LIFE magazine shoot on the set of the 1996 movie Romeo + Juliet. Wilkes had been studying artist David Hockney, who frequently shot 250 images of a single scene, then physically pasted them together to create a sense of bending time. On set, Wilkes decided to shoot the film’s stars, Leonardo DiCaprio and Claire Danes, embracing, then moved the camera to capture a reflection of them kissing seconds later. The finished composite image shows both contrasting images at once.

For Day to Night, Wilkes tries to make mental notes of the ever shifting landscape of random events unfolding below him. More often than not, they yield surprises. During his Times Square shoot, a bomb scare led the NYPD to clear the entire area in minutes—turning one of the busiest places on earth into a ghost town. As he shot the Santa Monica Pier, a man was handcuffed against a police car, an image that Wilkes later neatly juxtaposed next to kids running with balloons.

Glimpses into cordoned-off worlds are a signature, like his image of New York City’s keyed-entry Gramercy Park or the rabbinical blessings taking place at the Western Wall during Sukkoth. These peeks into the private take place alongside the decidedly public, as in the image of Wrigley Field during a Chicago Cubs day-night doubleheader, which lets you see the action inside the stadium as the regular business of city life goes on just outside. Wilkes wanted to shoot the iconic stadium before next year’s renovations forever alter it.

The pictures have become wildly popular online, allowing Wilkes to expand the series around the world. He recently shot Shanghai, Paris and London, and this month he’ll photograph the Macy’s Thanksgiving Day Parade.

They’re all prominent settings, but the photos are as much about who is in them as where they are taken. It’s the woman in Coney Island going out early in the morning for a walk along on the beach or the man in the middle of the night smoking a cigarette in New York’s Union Square—the thousands of everyday routines, happening side by side, that make Wilkes’ work so intriguing. Little instances, taken out of isolation and transformed by bumping against one another.

“Those things touch people because it grounds them in terms of who they are and what they’ve done in their lives,” ­Wilkes says. People see themselves in that moment, right next to everyone else and every other sliver of time.


Stephen Wilkes is a fine-art and commercial photographer based in New York. Wilkes was awarded the Photo District News Award of Excellence in 2011 and 2012. He is represented by Peter Fetterman Gallery in Los Angeles, Monroe Gallery in Santa Fe and Tulla Booth Gallery in Sag Harbor.

Josh Sanburn is a writer/reporter for TIME in New York. Follow him on Twitter @joshsanburn.


In each caption, Stephen Wilkes shares his thoughts on each of his iconic cityscapes. Wrigley Field, Chicago, 2013 This photograph was taken during the course of a Day/Night double header, a rare occurrence these days in major league baseball. Wrigley Field is the Grand Temple of baseball parks. It will change dramatically within the next year, as large jumbotrons will be installed into the stadium, forever changing this view. While the morning was sunny and clear, the afternoon made for a real challenge photographically. We had rain showers on and off throughout the day, and into the evening.Stephen Wilkes
Coney Island, Brooklyn, 2011 This was one of those perfect days to be at the beach. The temperature was 80 degrees and sunny. I even had a regatta race going on along the Atlantic Ocean. There’s so much to see on Coney Island. I was always afraid of missing some extraordinary character below me.Stephen Wilkes
The Flatiron, New York City, 2010 This photograph was made on 9/11/2010. We were boomed out in a 170 ft condor floating directly over 5th Ave. I don’t think you can create a series of photographs on New York, without recognizing what happened on 9/11. I felt this image reflected the state of where we are as New Yorkers; life moving on, yet continuing to feel the past.Stephen Wilkes
Millennium Park, Chicago, 2013 Millennium Park felt like the perfect place to capture the beauty of Chicago. We waited until 9:30pm for the fireworks, and at 9:00pm we had a dramatic change in weather. A monsoon like rainstorm came in and thankfully it passed, allowing us to capture one of the essential elements in this photograph.Stephen Wilkes
Presidential Inauguration, Washington D.C., 2013 For this photograph we were positioned in a 50 ft scissor lift centered above The National Mall during the morning of the Presidential Inauguration. After shooting from sunrise into sunset, we finally began doing our night exposures. At approximately 6:10pm, I made my second night exposure, 5 minutes later we were being battered by 30 mile per hour wind gusts. The shoot literally ended. I still can’t believe how fortunate we were to get our night 2 exposures. If the wind had come in 5 minutes earlier, we would have had no night photographs.Stephen Wilkes
Washington Square Park, New York City, 2009 One of my favorite memories of making this particular, “Day to Night”, was noticing several men dressed in tailed tuxedos, nothing too unusual about that except all these guys were wearing large white rabbit heads. They appeared as a group in the center of the park, and then suddenly dispersed throughout the scene. These men in black with large white rabbit heads created an almost, “Where’s Waldo” type narrative within this photograph.Stephen Wilkes
Shanghai, China, 2012 One of my favorite elements of this image is the transition point where day turns into night. I was able to capture the same boat in daytime and then again at night, so if you look closely you actually see the boat change from day into night. The “Blade Runner” like quality of the Pudong skyline added to this dramatic transition.Stephen Wilkes
Gramercy Park, New York City, 2011 One of the unique aspects of Gramercy Park is that it’s the only private park in New York City. It’s truly an oasis of greenery in lower Manhattan. I was fortunate to capture this view showing the activity inside and the outside park simultaneously Day to Night.Stephen Wilkes
New York City Library, New York City, 2011 Shooting this particular Day to Night allowed me an opportunity to get even more intimate with the human element within this series. While Shooting on 5th Avenue capturing the hustle and flow of people, I particularly enjoyed watching the group of construction workers eating their lunch while sitting on the outside wall of the library, people watching. It reminded me of a famous Charles C. Ebbets photograph of 1932, ” Lunch Break, 30 Rock”.Stephen Wilkes
Central Park, New York City, 2010 I’ve always loved photographing snowstorms in NYC. I had discovered this amazing view while on an editorial assignment, and had arranged to come back and photograph a Day to Night there sometime down the road. A few months later we had one of the heaviest snowstorms in NYC. I was able to get into the apartment early in the morning, and I literally had to shovel my way outside. What was most remarkable though was that throughout the entire day, the snow remained on the trees.Stephen Wilkes
Western Wall, Jerusalem, 2013 We spent months studying every aspect of the Western Wall, looking at countless images. We determined that there were 3 times a year when the wall has almost 100,000 people praying. I decided immediately that this was the foreground narrative I wanted for this photograph. We made this image on the day of Priestly Blessings, or “birkat kohanim” during the Sukkot holiday in October 2012. It took 3 months to find and secure this location. It is the highest and closest rooftop to the Western Wall. I photographed for 18 hrs, and shot over 1800 images.Stephen Wilkes
Bethesda Fountain, Central Park, New York City, 2011 While making this Day to Night at one of my favorite spots in Central Park, I saw brides throughout the day that were being photographed. I began to capture these various brides throughout the day and into the evening. We discovered that this particular day turned out to be a “love” holiday on the Korean Calendar! Hence all the girls were Korean brides, wanting to be photographed on this day. All these brides added a magical element to this, “Day to Night.”Stephen Wilkes
Times Square, New York City, 2010 This was one of the most difficult “Day to Nights” to execute. Times Square is like a canyon, and the light often travels through holes (down streets) within that canyon. I decided that wherever there is a shadow in the photograph, that would become night, and wherever the sunlight hit the scene would be day. Day and night alternates as your eye moves down Times Square.Stephen Wilkes
Santa Monica Pier, California, 2012 There where many magical moments while making this Day to Night. The one which still has me scratching my head though was, I happened to capture an actual arrest taking place right below us in the night side of my photograph. You can clearly see a young man being handcuffed in against the police car. Only in LA can you see balloons, surfing, cotton candy and an arrest all in the same place!Stephen Wilkes

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