The stars look close at hand in Neil Folberg’s cosmic nighttime photos, made in the deserts of Israel and the Sinai Peninsula and on view in “Celestial Nights,” an exhibition at The Dryansky Gallery in San Francisco up until January 17. Set among ruins and natural landscapes, the images suggest the radiant glow of a world lit by starlight. Like the work of the great 19th century landscape photographers such as Gustave Le Gray, the photos, originally made in the late 1990s and early 2000s, are composites of sky and earth. Folberg used the technology available at the time to create “a “digital negative” which enabled [him] to produce the images as silver gelatin prints,” reads a statement from the gallery. “As a result of new technology, Folberg has been able to revisit and digitally remaster the images bringing them closer to his original vision.”
Folberg was born in San Francisco and studied with Ansel Adams before moving to Israel in the 1970s, and the dramatic landscape of the Middle East has been a recurring theme in his work. The inspiration for the series came from spending time on the Sinai Peninsula while working on an earlier project. “I felt it was the greatest and most wonderful adventure I could imagine, wandering through the wadis, listening to the wind, feeling the stones or sand underfoot, sleeping outdoors below a sky of blazing stars,” Folberg said in a 2009 interview. “It began to feed on my imagination and reveal my inner character. The harsh daylight can often hide things as well as reveal them. During the day we feel all powerful, at night we begin to realize the vastness of the universe and one becomes aware of its scale and one’s limitations and our place in it. Between the finite and the infinite, the known and the unknown…to capture it on film is what drove me to create ‘Celestial Nights.'”
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