From a Smithsonian Magazine online review:
At first glance, Stephen Wilkes’ photographs look like a single moment in time. It is only upon closer inspection that viewers discover that each of his works is actually the result of shooting thousands of photographs from a stationary position over the course of a day and stitching them together digitally to create one cohesive panorama. The painstaking task of editing all of this information and whittling it down into one image can take months to complete, but the results capture a sense of place that can’t be expressed by a single frame alone.
Wilkes expands on this concept in his new book, Day to Night, which features panoramas of iconic places like New York’s Coney Island, Moscow’s Red Square and Arizona’s Grand Canyon seen over the course of a day. Time-lapse photos these are not, as Wilkes carefully selects the exact frames he’ll compile into the final image. (The book release coincides with “A Witness to Change,” a photographic exhibition to be held at Bryce Wolkowitz Gallery in New York City beginning September 12.)
Though his paintings and sculptures sell all over the world for fabulous prices, he has not enriched himself. He lives simply, with his wife, Trine Ellitsgaard Lopez, an accomplished weaver, in a traditional house in the middle of Oaxaca, and has used his considerable profits to found art centers and museums, an ethnobotanical garden and at least three libraries.
Toledo, whose origins were obscure and inauspicious, was the son of a leatherworker—shoemaker and tanner. He was born in Mexico City, but the family soon after moved to their ancestral village near Juchitán de Zaragoza in the Isthmus of Tehuantepec, nearer to Guatemala than to Mexico City—and being ethnically Zapotec, nearer culturally to the ancient pieties of the hinterland too.
More than 1,600 museums nationwide will be opening their doors for free on Sept. 21 in honor of Museum Day.
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