But Neil Folberg challenges both of these ideas by delivering beautiful and peaceful photographs of Middle-Eastern landscapes after dark. In his new book, Celestial Nights: Visions Of An Ancient Land, Folberg offers an additional twist. As if these nighttime landscapes weren’t already interesting enough, he adds another element that makes them truly unlike anything we’ve ever seen before. He combines the images with brilliantly detailed photographs of star-filled night skies.

From sweeping vistas to delicate close-ups, Folberg photographs his subjects by moonlight and creates digital composites using backgrounds of the cosmos that he has photographed independently. The resulting images provide the unique feeling of seeing both the earth and heavens encompassed wholly within a single frame. And thanks to digital imaging, this seemingly impossible photographic merger can be made with absolute realism and detail.

Because the stars are in constant rotation in the night sky, a traditional long-exposure landscape photograph would render stars as bright and beautiful trails across a blackened sky. Conversely, to make images of the stars without those moving trails requires a camera mounted on a platform that rotates in sync with the stars. Any image made like this would obviously create an earthen landscape devoid of detail and full of motion blur.

By utilizing both of these techniques, and bringing the separate images of earth and sky together in the computer, Folberg is able to create completely unique photographs, and that’s no small feat.

“The stars are a moving target, as any photographer who has photographed star trails knows,” he writes. “Making these photographs required a substantial investment in learning new skills that were required to photograph celestial objects.”

His inspiration for the photographs appears to fall into three seemingly simple categories, as he explained to writer Timothy Ferris in the introduction of Celestial Nights. “Every one of these photographs,” he tells Ferris, “is either something I saw and photographed, something I thought I saw but couldn’t photograph due to the technical limitations of photography, or something I wished to have seen but didn’t.”

This last idea seems to have produced the most striking images of the group. While we may have allowed our eyes to adjust to a darkened landscape on some nighttime excursion, or lay back to stare at a sky as full of stars as the nearby city lights would allow, never before the invention of the computer have we been able to combine these two fantastic views into one vision. But just because the computer plays a role in these digital combinations, don’t expect the results to be contrived of special effects. There’s nothing forced or false in the feel of these images. Although they’re entirely foreign to our eyes, there’s something very naturally beautiful and realistic about them. It makes the viewer feel that this should be the way we see the landscape and sky at night.

That’s perhaps what’s most intriguing about Folberg’s Celestial Nights—the images are at once strikingly odd and absolutely natural. We’re confronted by images we can’t imagine ever actually seeing outside of the photographs, but they just feel so right. As Ferris eloquently writes in the introduction, “These images actually do evoke, with striking force and authenticity, the experience of being out at night under the stars. What [Folberg] is after—and, in my view, achieves—is not just what nature looks like at night, but how it feels.”

Inspiration
A classically trained photographer, Folberg studied with and assisted the most renowned of all landscape photographers, Ansel Adams. Born in San Francisco and raised in the Midwest, he moved to Israel in 1976, where he has lived since. The combination of this oldest of lands full of ancient ruins, along with the abundant and timeless quality of the stars filling the sky, proved to be a great motivation for him.

“These visions were inspired by the hundreds of nights I spent under the dome of the stars in the Sinai desert,” he writes in his book, “sometimes walking by starlight along the dry riverbeds. The nights are dark and nearly monochromatic, but despite the murkiness, one can see well enough to walk among the mysterious, starlit landscapes.

“I have spent entire nights gazing at the view through my small telescope,” he writes, “trying to understand the meaning of so many stars and galaxies, enchanted by the beauty and seeming order of what I see. I use what knowledge I have of these distant celestial bodies to inform my sight, but imagination is always the better part of the view. I look at a ‘place’—or is it a time?—twenty-five to thirty million light years away, at the spiral galaxy known as the Whirlpool Galaxy, and I see the light of an object from so far in the past that I have no certainty that it is still there. I think I see the spiral arms of two galaxies tugging at one another—but it is such an effort to see it that it is hard to say how much of my view is sight and how much imagination.”

Viewers of these photographs are immediately confronted by this same question: How can these photographs possibly be real? They manage to bring together, in a most striking way, the land we know and the stars we can only hope to know. “The horizon line separates the world we know from the unknown and the unknowable beyond,” he writes. “A dark night, however, may conceal the horizon, so that heaven is no longer so easily distinguished from earth.”

Though their effect is more profound, Folberg’s efforts are grounded in reality. He utilizes traditional photographs and techniques, brought together in the computer to show us something we could never quite hope to see—except through the benefit of his mind’s eye. It represents what’s most unique about photography: the interplay between fact and fiction.

Conceptually, there’s something undeniably powerful about the idea of fixing together two distinct moments in time. He shows in these photographs the earthly landscape as it exists in the present day, filled with relics from the distant past, “lit by the soft, antique light of stars that glow in the past and illuminate the present.” What Folberg does to make these grand and ethereal images work is to ground them in simplicity.

The beauty inherent in the Celestial Nights photographs exists in their approachability. Few photographers can so effortlessly utilize the newest digital techniques, in conjunction with traditional photographic and darkroom skill, to create images that are so natural.

You can see more of Neil Folberg’s photography by visiting his Website at www.neilfolberg.com.