Comet Hale Bopp, 1997

Comet Hale Bopp is among Neil Folberg's compelling night images of the land and sky of Israel and the Sinai, offered to the viewer as mystical points of entry and departure. Folberg sets an ancient land resonant with meaning—and the cradle to three major world religions—against the awesome and eternal spectacle of the night sky. Folberg's night landscapes carry an aura that is both earthly and divine, emphasizing the singular and poignant presence of objects against the backdrop of the infinite. His photographs describe places where the spiritual is at once near, imprinted in the forms of the arid landscapes, and far away in the dark, starlit recesses of space.

Gelatin-Silver Print
Image Size: 10 15/16 x 10 11/16 inches
Paper Size: 15 5/8 x 11 15/16 inches
Edition of 49 + 5 Artist Proofs
Signed and numbered by the artist

Neil Folberg (b. 1950, San Francisco, California) is an American-Israeli photographer and gallerist. He is widely known for his color photographs of the landscape and architecture of the Middle East and the Mediterranean. Folberg received his BA in Photographic Field Studies from the University of California at Berkeley. Celestial Nights represents a return to black-and-white photographs, a technique Folberg honed as a student and colleague of the late Ansel Adams. Folberg’s first book was In A Desert Land (Abbeville Press, 1987); his second, And I Shall Dwell Among Them (Aperture, 1995), a study of the architecture of synagogues throughout the Jewish diaspora, received the National Jewish Book Award. Galleries worldwide have exhibited Folberg’s work; his photographs are in collections of the Metropolitan Museum of Art, New York, Bibliothèque Nationale, Paris; The Smithsonian Institute, Washington, D.C.; and the Tel-Aviv Museum, among others. Folberg has lived in Jerusalem with his wife and three sons since 1976, where he founded the Vision/Neil Folberg Gallery.