Читать книгу From Darkroom to Daylight - Harvey Wang - Страница 15

THE DECISIVE MOMENT BECOMES DAY TO NIGHT

Stephen Wilkes

The Day to Night series started, really, as a sonnet or love poem to New York City. I’ve always been fascinated by the energy of the city, and the pulse of New York City. If you look at the history of photography, there have been specific moments when there were these shifts, where the way we look at the world changes through the technology of photographing, and what happens in a camera. If you look at Muybridge and you look at the work of Harold Edgerton, those were sort of moments where suddenly, our perception of what a photograph is, changed. We’ve gotten to a point with technology now, with Photoshop, that we can really change the way we look at a single photograph. Suddenly, a single photograph can change time, within one frame. And so that concept was very exciting to me.

On location I’m just scanning very, very specific areas, looking for moments. I’m taking photographs for 15 hours. I sit and I photograph everything that I see. So every little detail, every little moment that you see in my photograph, is something I’ve consciously taken. It’s only upon taking all those images that I look at them, and I study them, and I edit them down from, say, 1,400 photographs to 50 of the best moments from the morning, midday, late afternoon, and evening. And then, working with the retoucher, I put the images together. What I love about the work is that you don’t feel the hand. You do not sense the fact that I’m changing time, immediately. It’s only upon closer examination that the photograph begins to reveal the fact that you’re actually seeing these wonderful moments that happened at a very specific time, during that day and into the night.

I think as an artist today, anything you can imagine, you can create. That’s an amazing statement, really, if you think about it, as a photographer, that you can do things that you never dreamed about being able to execute before. Now I want to go in and explore this next dimension of where—where can still photography go?