JIM MCDERMOTT reports, in an article first published on Religion News Service, that an exhibition of the photographer’s Day and Night view of the Vatican on Easter, one in a series of Wilkes’ epic shots of religion festivals, vaults the day into an almost cosmological framework…
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RNS
In more than 50 years of working as a photographer, Stephen Wilkes has exhibited a taste for the epic. In 2000, he spent nearly two months travelling the United States, chronicling the country at the turn of the millennium. In 2009, he began what has become his signature project, Day to Night, in which he spends up to 36 hours photographing from a single location, then merges the results into a massive photograph that shows night turning into day in a single image.
In 2016, Wilkes decided to photograph Easter Sunday in St Peter’s Square. The resulting 1.2-by-2.7 metre photograph, now on exhibit at the Barone Campus Center at Fairfield University, involved Wilkes taking 1,575 individual photographs over the course of more than 24 hours from the roof of the Istituto Maria Santissima Bambina, outside the Vatican walls.
‘Easter Mass, Vatican City, Rome, Italy, Day to Night’ 2016. PICTURE: Photo © Stephen Wilkes/Screenshot
That distance casts the view into an almost cosmological framework. Massive, gorgeous cumulus clouds roll through, a single white dove hanging in their midst. The picture seems to capture both the fullness of the promise of Easter Sunday – Christ resurrected and his community’s joyful mission to the world – and its painful realities.
The work also offers fascinating vignettes of Easter at the Vatican. Two priests in the lower right-hand corner walk toward St. Peter’s before dawn. Meanwhile, Pope Francis celebrates Mass and blesses people in 10 different places throughout the center of the photograph.
RNS spoke to Wilkes by Zoom about his experience of spending an Easter looking at St Peter’s Square…
How did you come to want to photograph the Vatican at Easter?
“As I started to expand Day to Night, I got fascinated with the idea of telling the story of major religious festivals. I shot the Kumbh Mela, the largest in the world, where the women come to pray in the Ganges – an amazing experience. I was in a police tower for 16 hours photographing that. In Jerusalem I shot a Day to Night during the priestly blessings at the Western Wall. I am Jewish, actually, and had never been to Israel. I was at the highest point of the Western Wall. You literally can see all the religions of the Western world from there. And when the sun rose, it was almost like the parting of the sea.
“I was so moved by that experience, I decided I wanted to do the Easter Mass.”
Was it hard to get access?
“It was incredibly challenging. I spent two years working on it. When you’re dealing with the Vatican, you can’t just rent somebody’s apartment. There’s an area where they set up the TV cameras on the very top of the outer cornice [on the inner edge of the Colonnades that surround St Peter’s Square]. That was a no-go.
“Then lo and behold, on social media, I got an instant message from a priest in the Vatican who’s doing his own little book and wanted to know if I’d be open to allowing him to use my Day to Night of Paris. And I said, ‘Oh my God, this priest is in the Vatican!’ He literally connected me to the Istituto. There’s only seven rooms I think in the entire place, and we got two, one for myself and one for my assistants.
Once you’re there, are there things you do to prepare?
“I try to expose myself to the art connected to the place I’m photographing. If there’s a museum there or something specifically about the culture I’m photographing, I really try to immerse myself in it. I always say the more information I have, the more I can ingest, the more I can channel into my photograph in some way.
“So I was walking through the Vatican Museums the day before the shoot and found a panoramic etching, about 200-years-old, of St Peter’s Square. And it was exactly the view that I’m shooting from. What are the chances of that? I felt unbelievable gratitude. It was like, I was in the right place, and everything was happening exactly as it should.
“I have a great team that have worked with me for years, and they always tease me, they say Stephen, you must have some kind of halo over your head, because good stuff happens for me. But I just try to put out positive energy. I believe in the universe. And I believe if you stay open to the universe, things come through.”
How early did you get started?
“We were out there at 2 o’clock in the morning, setting up on the roof. I photographed right from the edge, almost a decorative rise. I was up there for over 24 hours.”
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Wow. And you’re there watching the whole time?
“Yes. I’m so afraid of missing something, a magical moment. I caught two priests leaving at the end of the day, you see them walking. And then a homeless man came up and you could see him in the picture putting his hand out. It’s just an unbelievable moment. If I’m not present I never see that, I never capture that moment.
“It’s like a deep meditation. Nobody talks to me. It’s just me and my assistant. As the images come up, I’m looking at them on a large computer screen, seeing the details. So it’s a real-time thing. These visual things are happening in front of my eyes, and I’m putting the picture together. I’m telling the story of what the day was.”
What stood out to you?
“I was very drawn to this Pope. I think he’s extraordinary. I was captivated by the way people are drawn to this man. When he drove around in the crowd in the Popemobile, watching all the people was like watching a school of fish or a field of wheat: Wherever he would go, the wheat would move. It was as if everything was in unison. It was the most beautiful, almost harmonic movement of humanity that I’ve ever witnessed.”
Not many people have had the experience of being present at these events, let alone spending a full day watching them unfold. What has that been like?
“I think when you begin to dive into religion, if you stay open enough, you can find that it’s almost as if you’re hearing one story that we’re all touched by in individual ways. As kids we used to have tin cans and a little wire, and you’d whisper something and someone else would hear it and they’d whisper to somebody else? The essence of the story is still there, it just changes a little bit. Every person that hears it, hears it a little differently.
“I found myself thinking about those things as I was doing this. Even though we all have different stories to share, it’s all about one wonderful story.”
It sounds as if the experience has been powerful for you personally, maybe even spiritual.
“It is. It’s a spiritual journey. The joy of just looking for me is everything. The more I look, the happier I am. I think we live in a world, too, today that is so disconnected from the act of looking. We’re so distracted. We don’t get the time to just float for a second, to allow the moments of the world to come through us.
“I find when I photograph, it changes the way I perceive all the elements of the planet, and how connected everything is. There’s this great joy in being able to see something that’s so beautiful, the sense of awe. And when you have a sense of awe, you realize how blessed we are to be able to breathe the air we breathe, walk the ground we walk on.
“We can all see. We all have this gift. You just have to take the time to look.”
Jim McDermott, a former associate editor of America Magazine, is a screen and magazine writer in New York. His Substack newsletter on pop culture and spirituality is called Pop Culture Spirit Wow.
This interview has been edited and condensed for clarity.
