Stop and look.
Really look. This is what Stephen Wilkes’ photos insist viewers do. And it is what Stephen Wilkes has done with patience and passion since he was twelve years old, pointing his camera down the mouth of a microscope, thirsting for the most detailed view of his subject. The Westport resident can spend 36 hours shooting the same scene to create his world-renowned time-lapse Day to Night images, of which there are 75 and counting. With so much observation comes more than spellbinding photos; wisdom flows from Wilkes’ mouth with ease, like vivid colors spilling onto his film. Only ease is the wrong word altogether. Stephen Wilkes camps out on a mountain top within lava-spitting distance of an erupting volcano to get the shot. He has captured a total eclipse in Antarctica and battled 50 mph winds for a day and a half to capture Bears Ears National Monument. That Day to Night image landed on last September’s cover of National Geographic—an issue focused on protecting America’s natural resources. Wilkes has a granddaughter now and is concerned about the planet. Perhaps if mankind looks as closely as he does at the world, things will change.
Wilkes captured the celebratory crowd at Barack Obama’s inauguration in this
Day to Night photograph. (He also captured the eerily deserted National Mall during Joe Biden’s inauguration in 2021.) .
The Mentors
Wilkes’ mom, an opera singer, was a Holocaust survivor who arrived at Ellis Island at age nine with her family’s belongings sewn into a teddy bear. His dad was a painter who gave up art to pursue business so he could support his family, which is what he told his son to do. “There were challenges at home,” recalls Wilkes, who was born in Jamaica, Queens, and grew up in Great Neck, Long Island. “I had to figure it out myself.”
Wilkes didn’t have to venture far from his Westport home to capture a spectacular sunset on Compo Beach.
During a field trip to The Met in seventh grade, “Bruegel’s painting of The Harvesters changed my life,” he says. “I was this impressionable kid, and I saw this epic landscape with all these narratives within it. I was fascinated by that ability to tell stories.”
By thirteen, he was assisting Rene Aresu, the photographer who shot his bar mitzvah. “I have an identical twin. Rene did a portrait of us by candlelight with his left side lit up and my right. We are mirror twins, so that made one of our faces,” he explains. Wilkes was
hooked. By sixteen, he had his own business shooting events. “Rene told me, ‘They only throw the rice once,’” says Wilkes. “He taught me what it meant to be professional.”
Despite pressure from his father to pursue a realistic career, Wilkes was determined. “Nothing made me feel like I felt when taking photos,” he says. He took night classes at Parsons during high school and picked up another mentor, Bob Edelman. “I was thinking RIT for college but Bob told me, ‘If you want your pictures to speak to people, you need a great liberal arts education. And study business; most photographers are lousy businessmen.’”
Wilkes pursued a dual major in photography and business at the Neuhaus School at the Syracuse University. While studying abroad in London, his professor, Tom Richards, sent him “headfirst into color. He saw one roll of color of mine and said, ‘Don’t shoot any more black and white,’” recalls Wilkes. “I saw the world in a really vivid way.”
Jay Maisel’s “On Color” series in Life magazine caught the college kid’s eye. He took a chance and phoned Maisel’s studio in New York. The photographer himself answered. “I couldn’t believe it!” says Wilkes. He dropped his portfolio as instructed by his idol and found himself with his summer dream job in 1979—which evolved into a forty-year relationship. After seeing photos Wilkes shot during his senior year in China, Maisel told him, “You’re too good to assist, kid. I’m making you my associate.” In two years under his tutelage, “Jay helped define me and my value as a photographer,” says Wilkes.
When Maisel, at eighty-four, had to sell his 35,000-square-foot building—a six-story former bank on the Bowery filled to the brim with a mind-boggling assortment of objects—in 2015, Wilkes shot a documentary about the move, Jay Myself (available on Amazon). The film is a visual masterpiece about the eccentric artist and a fading era in New York. “What Jay had in New York, you’ll never see that again,” he says. “Every floor was a cross-section of his mind.”
The Work
In exploring Wilkes’ mind, an idea he had in 1996 is a good place to start. He was in Mexico City, on assignment to fill a gatefold in Life magazine on Baz Luhrmann’s Romeo and Juliet. In pondering how to capture the square set in one panoramic shot, Wilkes—inspired by David Hockney’s photo collages—decided to shoot 250 images of the scene and layer them together into a single picture, with the last image catching a reflection in a mirror of Claire Danes and Leonardo DiCaprio kissing, but in the center of the photo they are just embracing. “I was changing time in the photo,” says Wilkes, “but it was so much work! Sixteen years later, Photoshop was invented and allowed me to do it seamlessly.”
In the meantime, Wilkes ushered in the age of digital printing with his America in Detail series for Epson, which was shot during 52 days on the road in 2000. Famed musician Graham Nash—also a printer—did the large-scale printing of the photos. Bette Wilkes, Wilkes’ wife and business manager/producer, jokingly asked for a serenade as part of the deal, and Nash surprised her with an epic a cappella rendition of “Our House” dedicated to her at the San Francisco exhibition party.
This photograph hangs on the wall in Wilkes’ home, reminding him of his mother’s journey to America.
Wilkes’ first Day to Night was of The High Line for Life magazine in 2009. “I was scouting and looking at it all times of day,” explains Wilkes. “I loved it at lunch time, but I also loved it at night. I asked my photo editor, ‘What if I could change time in a photo, day to night, from south to north?’” Achieving that involves taking 1,500 photos from the same vantage point for 12 to 36 hours. Focusing in this way is “deeply meditative,” says Wilkes. “In a world where we are constantly bombarded by texts and emails, people don’t daydream anymore. My work is the antithesis of that…. The reaction was unbelievable.”
Washington Square followed, then a series in the city—Wilkes’ “love sonnet to New York”—then cities across the globe and historic events: Obama’s packed inauguration, Biden’s deserted one, the March on D.C. in 2020. “Paintings of the Black Plague had a profound effect on me,” says Wilkes, of capturing the pandemic. “I’m trying to provide a window into how we live. Historically, as these images age, they become more and more important. In my Day to Night of Times Square ten years ago, New York was a yellow stream of cabs; now there are hardly any. You never think history will come quickly, but it does.”
Kathy Moran, Wilkes’ former editor at National Geographic, says, “Stephen shoots sports beautifully, then turns around and make the most haunting images from Ellis Island, and then comes up with the concept of showing the passage of time through still photography. He is constantly pushing the boundaries of how he sees and approaches storytelling. You can spend hours going through one of his photographs and seeing something different in every inch of it. And anyone who meets him has the same takeaway—you think you are meeting this photographic superstar and within minutes feel like you’ve known him forever. He’s just the nicest person.”
This shot required mediating between the two feuding farmers who owned it to get the rights to shoot the side where the sun set.
Wilkes began applying his Day to Night concept to wildlife, camouflaging himself for a 30-hour shoot of a waterhole in Serengeti National Park. “That shot transformed my whole consciousness on wildlife and preservation,” he says. “I got to see these animals communicate and care for their young. The greatest thing I saw is the connectivity—how everything is connected in how they live in their environment.”
Wilkes worked with Moran on four Day to Night photos to commemorate the centennial of the Migratory Bird Act. Moran describes it as “one of the most logistically challenging things either of us had ever tackled.” For a story on the 30×30 Initiative—the mission to preserve 30 percent of land and sea by 2030—Wilkes shot at four locales, including Bears Ears, which was put in jeopardy of being turned into a lithium mine by Trump’s administration. “Of all the photographers I worked with in 40 years at National Geographic, Stephen is the one who constantly challenged and astonished in all good ways,” says Moran.
Family & Westport
“When I was 9, I went to Stew Leonard’s with my dad. He used to sell Stew soft drink flavors,” says Wilkes. “I always loved Westport. It has this amazing topography, artistic community, and history.” In 1994, he and Bette moved their family here from the city to a pretty white house with a bucolic backyard and Compo Beach a few miles away—all places Wilkes could aim his lens. “We also wanted great schools,” he says. “I believe in the public school system.”
This Day to Night was photographed down the road at Fairfield’s Jennings Beach and is on permanent display at the Fairfield Museum & History Center.
Whether it was Westport schools or parents who modeled marrying work ethic and passion, the Wilkes’ kids are already laying down their own legacies. Sam is a bass guitarist, who has collaborated with the likes of Chaka Khan and Rufus Wainwright. “My dad’s work, like the rest of his life, contains a deep humanity and childlike joy for all that interests him,” says Sam. “I feel very lucky to have been raised by such devoted and loving people. His collaboration with my mom is legendary. The professionalism and brilliance she brings to their business partnership can’t be overstated.”
“My dad has always said, ‘The harder I work, the luckier I get. And work doesn’t feel like work if you genuinely love what you do,’” says Jennie Wilkes, who is Senior Director of Global Creative Marketing at Netflix. “That philosophy has guided me my whole life.”
Wilkes’ Migratory Birds series, featuring four photographs—Black-browed Albatrosses, Northern Gannets, Sandhill Cranes (pictured), and Lesser Flamingos—inspired the photographer to shoot more wildlife and raise awareness about how to protect our planet’s creatures.
Even though Wilkes’ own dad lived his life with a different mindset, he came around. “My dad had dementia. I went to visit him, when he was about 90,” recounts Wilkes. “My father’s friend told me that the day before my dad had said, ‘My whole life I told Stephen he wasn’t going to make it as a photographer. Can you imagine what a tragedy it would have been if he had listened?’”
What’s next? “I’m talking with an astronaut,” says Wilkes. “I’d like to do something from space.” He’s not one to get hung up on a minor hurdle like defying gravity.
“I always loved Westport. It has this amazing topography, artistic community, and history.” – Stephen Wilkes
Portraits by andrea carson