The passage of time. Captured in the photographs of Stephen Wilkes.

Video: TED – Ideas Worth Spreading

Photos: Stephen Wilkes

Translation: Maricene Crus. Revision: Custódio Marcelino

Since opening his studio in New York in 1983, photographer Stephen Wilkes has built a unique body of work and become one of the most renowned photographic artists in the United States.

His images are part of museum collections such as the George Eastman Museum, James A. Michener Art Museum, Houston Museum of Fine Arts, Dow Jones Collection, Griffin Museum of Photography, Jewish Museum of NY, Library of Congress, Snite Museum of Art, The Historic New Orleans Collection, Museum of the City of New York, 9/11 Memorial Museum, and numerous private collections. They have graced the covers of major American publications such as the New York Times Magazine, Vanity Fair, TIME, Fortune, National Geographic, Sports Illustrated, and many others.

Day to Night, Wilkes' most impressive photographic project, began in 2009. It consists of epic photos of cities and natural landscapes, capturing the passage of light between day and night through the lenses of his cameras.

Video: The Passage of Time, by Stephen Wilkes, at TED.

Full translation of the video:

I am driven by pure passion to create photographs that tell stories. Photography can be described as the recording of a unique moment, frozen within a fraction of time. Each moment or photograph represents a tangible moment of our memories as time passes. But what if you could capture more than one moment in a photograph? What if a photograph could truly unravel time, compressing the best moments of day and night perfectly into a single image?

I created a concept called "Day to Night," and I believe it will change the way you see the world. I know it changed it for me.

My process begins by photographing emblematic locations, places that are part of what I call our collective memory. I photograph from a privileged fixed point, and I never move. I capture the fleeting moments of humanity and light as time passes. I photograph for 15 to 30 hours, taking more than 1,5 images, and then I choose the best moments of the day and night.

Using time as a guide, I blend these best moments into a single photograph, visualizing our conscious journey through time. I can take you to Paris for a view of the Tournelle Bridge. And I can show you the morning rowers along the Seine River. And, simultaneously, I can show you Notre Dame glowing at night. Meanwhile, I can show you the romance of the City of Lights.

I'm essentially a street photographer, suspended in the air 15 meters high, and everything you see in this photograph actually happened on this day.

"Day to Night" is a global project, and my work has always been about history. I'm fascinated by the concept of going to a place like Venice and seeing it during a specific event. I decided I wanted to see the historic Regatta, an event that has been happening since 1498. The boats and the costumes are exactly as they were then. And an important element I want you to understand is: this isn't a time frame, this is me photographing throughout the day and night. I'm a tireless collector of magical moments. And what drives me is the fear of missing one of them.

The whole concept originated in 1996. Life magazine hired me to create a panoramic photograph of the cast and crew of Baz Luhrmann's Romeo + Juliet. I arrived on set and realized: it's a square! So, the only way I could create a panorama was by photographing a collage of 250 individual images. So, I asked DiCaprio and Claire Danes to hug each other. And, as I turned my camera to the right, I noticed there was a mirror on the wall and saw that they were reflected in it. And for that moment, that image, I asked them: "Could you kiss for this photo?" Then I went back to my studio in New York, hand-glued these 250 images together, stepped back and said: "Wow, that looks really cool! I'm changing time in a photograph." And this concept actually stayed with me for 13 years until technology finally caught up with my dreams.

This is an image I created of the Santa Monica Pier, "Day to Night." And I'll show you a short video that gives you an idea of ​​what it's like to be with me when I create these images. To begin, it's important to understand that to get views like these, I spend a good portion of my time high up, usually on a lift platform or a crane. So, this is a typical day: 12 to 18 hours non-stop capturing the unfolding of the entire day.

One of the great things is that I love people-watching. And trust me when I say: it's the best seat in the box you could wish for.

And that's really how I create these photographs. So, when I decide what my landscape and location will be, I have to decide when the day begins and the night ends. And that's what I call the time vector. Einstein described time as a fabric. Think of the surface of a trampoline: it deforms and stretches with gravity. I also see time as a fabric, but I take that fabric and stretch it, compressing it into a single plane.

One of the unique aspects of this work is also that, if we look at all my photos, the time vector changes: sometimes I go from left to right, sometimes from front to back, from top to bottom, or even diagonally. I am exploring the space-time continuum within a two-dimensional photograph.

When I create these images, it's literally like a real-time puzzle happening in my mind. I construct a photograph based on time, and I call it a master plate. This can take several months to complete. The funny thing about this work is that I have absolutely no control when I get up there on a given day and take the photographs. So, I never know who will appear in the photo, whether it will be a beautiful sunrise or sunset, no control whatsoever. It's at the end of the process, if I've truly had a great day and everything has remained the same, that I then decide who stays and who goes, and it's all based on time. I'll use those best moments I've chosen over a month of editing, and they blend seamlessly into the master plate. I'm compressing day and night as I've seen them, creating a unique harmony between these two very discordant worlds.

Painting has always been a major influence on all my work, and I've always been a big fan of Albert Bierstadt, the great painter of the Hudson River School. He inspired a recent series I did on national parks. This is Bierstadt's Yosemite Valley. And this is the photograph I created of Yosemite. This is the cover story for the January 2016 issue of National Geographic magazine. I shot for over 30 hours on this photo. I was literally on the edge of a cliff, capturing the stars and the moonlight during their transition, the moonlight illuminating El Capitan. And I also captured this transition of time across the landscape. The best part is, of course, seeing humanity's magical moments with the changing of the weather, from day to night.

And on a personal note, I actually had a photocopy of Bierstadt's painting in my pocket. And when the sun began to rise over the valley, I started trembling with excitement because I looked at the painting and thought, "Oh my God, I'm getting the exact same illumination that Bierstadt got 100 years ago."

"Day to Night" is about everything; it's like a compilation of everything I love about photography. It's about landscape, about street photography, it's about color and architecture, perspective, scale, and especially, history.

This is one of the most historic moments I've ever been able to photograph: Barack Obama's presidential inauguration in 2013. And if you look closely at this photo, you can see the time changing on those large television screens. You can see Michelle waiting with the children, the president now greeting the crowd, he takes his oath, and now he's talking to the people. There are many challenging aspects when creating images like this. For this particular photograph, I was in a 15-meter scissor lift, suspended in the air, and it wasn't very stable. So, every time my assistant and I alternated our weight, our horizontal line shifted. For each image you see, and there were about 1,8 in this photo, we both had to tape our feet into position every time I pressed the shutter. 

I learned extraordinary things doing this work. I think the two most important were patience and the power of observation. When you photograph a city like New York from above, I discovered that the people inside the cars I kind of live with every day no longer look like people inside cars. They look like a giant school of fish; like a form of emergent behavior. And when people describe the energy of New York, I think this photograph begins to capture that. Looking more closely at my work, you can see that there are stories happening. You realize that Times Square is a canyon, it's shadow and it's sunlight. I decided, in this photograph, to use time as a checkerboard. Wherever there are shadows, it's night, and wherever there is sun, it's day.

Time is this extraordinary thing we can never wrap our heads around. But in a very original and special way, I believe these photographs have begun to give time a face. They embody a new metaphysical visual reality. When you spend 15 hours looking at a place, you will see things differently than if we went up with our camera, took a picture, and walked away.

This was a perfect example. I call it the "Sacré-Coeur Selfie." I watched for over 15 hours as all these people didn't even look at the Sacré-Coeur. They were more interested in using it as a backdrop. They would go up, take a picture, and then leave. I thought this was an extraordinary example, a powerful disconnect between what we think the human experience is versus what the human experience has evolved into. The act of sharing suddenly became more important than the experience itself. (Applause)

And finally, my most recent image, which has a special meaning for me: this is Serengeti National Park in Tanzania. This was photographed in the middle of the Seronera, which is not a reserve. I went precisely during the peak of the migration hoping to capture the most diverse range of animals. Unfortunately, when we arrived, there was a drought happening during the peak of the migration, a five-week drought. So, all the animals were drawn to the water. I found this waterhole, and I felt that if everything remained the same as it had been behaving, I would have a real opportunity to capture something unique.

We spent three days studying the scene, and nothing could have prepared me for what I witnessed during our photo shoot. I photographed for 26 hours in crocodile camouflage, 5 meters suspended in the air. What I witnessed was unimaginable. Frankly, it was biblical. For 26 hours, we watched all these rival species share a single resource called water. The same resource that humanity will supposedly be at war over for the next 50 years. The animals never even grunted at each other. They seem to understand something that we humans don't understand: that this precious resource called water is something we all have to share.

When I created this image, I realized that "Day to Night" is truly a new way of seeing, of compressing time, of exploring the space-time continuum within a photograph.

As technology evolves alongside photography, photographs will not only communicate a deeper meaning of time and memory, but will also compose a new narrative of untold stories, creating a timeless window into our world.

Thank you.