The Flomenhaft Gallery is proud to present Neil Folberg’s Odyssey. By 1967 at the age of 17 Folberg was studying with Ansel Adams in the Spring Workshop in Yosemite Valley. In 1968, he began his studies at the University of California at Berkeley, which led through a program of individualized study with the head of the design department, photographer, William Garnett, to a B.A. in Photographic Field Studies. In 1970, Folberg received a President's Undergraduate Fellowship from UC Berkeley which he used to make photographs in Macedonia, Yugoslav for six months in 1971.
Our exhibit begins with several works from Folberg’s Macedonia adventure. His interest in landscape came to the fore after his move to Israel in1976. In 1979 he began working in color, making landscape photographs in the Sinai desert. Prints from this period were made by Folberg himself on Cibachrome. With the signing of the Israeli-Egyptian peace treaty, he expanded his horizons to include Egypt and the desert areas of Israel and Jordan. Included in our exhibit are several photographs of the Sinai.
The desert landscapes have been compiled along with a text that he wrote in a book titled "In a Desert Land: Photographs of Israel, Egypt and Jordan," published by Abbeville Press of New York in 1987.
Folberg’s synagogue photos further expand our understanding of Folberg’s depth and range. He spent nearly four years researching and photographing synagogues throughout the world, resulting in a book published in 1995 by Aperture titled "And I Shall Dwell Among Them: Historic Synagogues of the World," which resulted in a traveling exhibition in Europe and the United States. This architectural work represented something of a breakthrough for Folberg, since it necessitated making the photographs of synagogue interiors using artificial light not only to illuminate, but to create an evocative scene. In landscape work, he had been obliged to accept available light. Now he strove to control it. This laid the groundwork for some of his most recent work.
Other important works that will be shown are spectacular night photos. He set out to capture the mystery of Israel's ancient ruins and landscape illuminated by the light of stars. Now he returned to black-and-white with his series of starlit landscapes on which he worked from 1997-2002. This work, collected in the book, "Celestial Nights: Visions of an Ancient Land" (Aperture Press, New York 2001), was winner of the New York Book Show Prize, First Place Photography, 2002. It too became a traveling exhibition through 2007 in the United States and Israel.
Our exhibit will also display works from his last two series, both commissioned by Lin Arison who created the concepts. She wrote the text for Neil’s "Travels with Van Gogh and the Impressionists," a book to be released this fall by Abbeville Press. Folberg set out to recreate the Impressionists’ vision, using all the skills he had acquired, including the use of artificial light in studio-like settings, but adding the element of portraiture, a subject he had never touched before. Folberg’s photographs in this series channel the central spirit of the Impressionists’ work, and reapply that spirit to contemporary subjects and settings.
Finally, we are excited to add works from Feast of the Senses…In Umbria, Neil’s latest excursion in photography. He toured with some of the New World Symphony’s young musicians in the classic landscape of the Italian countryside, and was inspired by the masterful, spirited painters of the Renaissance. He had fun with the young musicians, listening to a lot of good music, drinking nice red wine and looking at Italian Renaissance art. He said, “It got all mixed up in my head and this is what came out." In this latest body of work, Folberg combines all of the elements that have characterized his earlier work, evocative landscapes and architectural settings, portraiture and the use of artificial lighting to create an almost surreal, intense light that evokes the richness of Renaissance painting. But to this he has added an additional element, that of theater.