Celestial Nights Portfolio: Olive Tree; Starry Grove; Sagittarius

"In landscape, I see a revelation of how pure spirituality has descended into physical existence ... These are the scenes, on the human edge of the cosmos, that I am showing in these photographs."

—Neil Folberg

This exquisite portfolio comes from the Aperture book and exhibition Celestial Nights: Visions of An Ancient Land (2001). The world depicted here is composed of a delicately constructed order where earthly elements and the heavens mirror each other. Folberg sets an ancient land resonant with meaning—as it is 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.

Portfolio of Three Gelatin-Silver Prints
Image Size: Varied (listed below)
Paper Size: 16 x 20 inches
Edition of 150 + 15 Artist Proofs
Signed by the artist

Prints included in this portfolio:
Olive Tree, 1997
Image Size: 7 3/8 x 9 3/4 inches
Starry Grove, 1999
Image Size: 11 5/8 x 14 1/2 inches
Sagittarius, 2000
Image Size: 11 7/16 x 11 7/16 inches

Note: The paper that the artist specified initially is no longer available – only 33 portfolios will be produced in this series.

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.