Stephen Wilkes // Day to Night. Art Edition B, 'Grand Canyon, Arizona, 2015'

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. The book also features extraordinary details—works of art in their own right that highlight the stories contained within each image. A bride makes her way through Central Park; in Tanzania, zebras gather around a near-invisible watering hole during a drought; in Rio de Janeiro, surfers come and go while a man holds a sign reading “No more than two questions per customer.” “It is exactly these small stories, these details, that draw people into the photographs,” says Wilkes. Once discovered, these mini narratives lend each composition a personal, candid feel.

This Art Edition (No. 101–200) comes with a print of Grand Canyon, Arizona, 2015, each numbered and signed by Wilkes. After being granted special permission to use the off-limits Desert View Watchtower by the National Park Service, Wilkes lived and slept there for 36 hours. “I saw the landscape backlit and toplit in all its depth and dimensionality. I was also able to capture the human scale in this natural context,” he said. Luck favored his preparation: a clear night sky allowed him, with an hour-long exposure, to capture perfect moonlight. This rare moment became part of the final photograph, here available in a large-format digital pigment print. The book and print are both numbered and signed by Stephen Wilkes.