(c) Neil Folberg / Abbeville Press, 2008
“The deserts of Israel, Egypt and Jordan seem never to have sat for a lens quite as magical as Neil Folberg’s. Since 1979, Folberg has been focusing on the arid lands of these Mideast countries, capturing not only their dramatic contours and colors but the dazzling light shows produced at night by the skies above them… Spectacular is not too effusive a word….” — Grace Glueck, The New York Times
In CELESTIAL NIGHTS, photographer NEIL FOLBERG skillfully contrasts the arid landscape of Israel and the Sinai Desert against the awesome and eternal spectacle of the night sky. The earth and heavens are mingled in this collection of arresting photographs, capturing a spectacular world of nocturnal landscapes where the horizon isn’t always definitive. This, to Folberg, represents a blurred division between present and eternity, substance and spirit, and knowledge and imagination. As Folberg writes, “No one can draw that line with precision, for we exist in all of these worlds at once.”
CELESTIAL NIGHTS marks a return to black-and-white photography for Neil Folberg, a technique he honed as a student and colleague of the late Ansel Adams. The volume presents a set of photographs that capture not only the skies but also their earthly foreground, creating a striking juxtaposition of the vast arid wilderness with the infinite and starry heavens. These stunning nighttime scenes feature the samehistorically and religiously resonant region of the Middle East that Folberg captured in daytime color in his first book, Abbeville’s In a Desert Land.
The landscapes in CELESTIAL NIGHTS carry an aura that is both earthly and divine. Folberg’s photographs describe places where the spiritual is at once near, imprinted in the arid landscapes, and far away, in the dark, starlit recesses of space.
NEIL FOLBERG is widely known for his color photographs of the landscape and architecture of the Middle East and the Mediterranean. Galleries have exhibited Folberg’s work worldwide; his photographs are in the collections of The Metropolitan Museum of Art, Bibliothèque Nationale, and the Smithsonian Institution. Born in San Francisco and raised in the Midwest, Folberg has lived in Jerusalem with his wife and three sons since 1976.
CELESTIAL NIGHTS
Visions of an Ancient Land
Photographs and Afterword by Neil Folberg
Introduction by Timothy Ferris
Abbeville Press, New York
January 2008
$45.00 cloth - 336 pages - 39 black-and-white photographs
ISBN 978-0-7892-0954-2
Also published by Abbeville Press:
IN A DESERT LAND
Photographs of Israel, Egypt, and Jordan
Text and photography by Neil Folberg
Abbeville Press, New York
204 pages - 200 full-color illustrations
$49.95 cloth
ISBN 978-0-7892-0125-6
TRAVELS WITH VAN GOGH AND THE IMPRESSIONISTS
Discovering the Connections
Text by Lin Arison
Photograhs by Neil Folberg
Abbeville Press, New York
284 pages - 40 paintings and 100 photographs, all in full color
$45.00 cloth
ISBN 978-0-7892-0932-0
