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Tunnel View, Yosemite

Stephen WILKES

2014

series: Day to Night

One of the most famous photos in this series is the Tunnel View photograph, Yosemite National Park. Taken in 2014, it was the coverage of the National Geographic of January 2016. The Yosemite Valley, the emblematic tourist destination in the United States, is known throughout the world with nearly 3.5 million visitors per year. The artist’s passion for these places of intense passages lies in the concentration of humanity that can be captured in a day. Moments of life and strong memo-ries for each of the people in the picture. It is possible to see a father playing with his child, motor-cyclists taking a few minutes to observe the view, couples hugging each other, families... All these people, so different, have walked the same ground during the same day.

Stephen WILKES says about this picture in a TED Talk in February 2016, that he was greatly inspired by the painter Albert BIERSTADT (1830-1902) who painted this same valley many times in the 1860s.

Albert BIERSTADT, Looking Down Yosemite Valley, California, 1865, huile sur toile, 164 x 245 cm, Birmingham Museum of Art, Alabama

What marked the photographer in these paintings was the treatment of light. Indeed, the soft and warm light that emerges in the centre of the photograph can easily remind us of these paintings. We see a kind of timelessness of an immutable place where every day the sun sets and rises, flooding the valley with this very special light.

Know more: https://artsbma.org/january-2014-looking-down-yosemite-v...

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Tunnel View, Yosemite - Stephen WILKES
Tunnel View, Yosemite
Other photographs of the exhibition