LOS ANGELES, CALIFORNIA.- Los Angeles—Celestial Nights: Visions of an Ancient Land, an exhibition of more than 30 compelling works by American photographer Neil Folberg (b. 1950), will be on view at the Skirball Cultural Center from November 3, 2004 through January 30, 2005. Appealing to the scientific, spiritual and artistic eye simultaneously, the images capture the timeless beauty of the land and sky of Jerusalem and Sinai. Presented in association with the Skirball’s landmark Einstein exhibition, Celestial Nights: Visions of an Ancient Land will be on view in the Skirball’s Ruby Gallery. Ruby Gallery exhibitions are always free to the public.

Folberg, a student and colleague of the late Ansel Adams, is widely known for his color photography of Mediterranean and Middle Eastern landscapes and built environments. For the Celestial Nights series, Folberg created large-scale, black-and-white nightscapes of Israel employing multiple exposures with a variety of infrared and scientific films for enhanced response. In the works, the heavens and the earth appear to mirror each other in seamless splendor, setting an ancient land resonant in meaning—the cradle of three major world religions—against the awesome and eternal spectacle of the infinite night sky. As bestselling science writer Timothy Ferris (Coming of Age in the Milky Way, The Whole Shebang) writes in the large-format book that accompanies the exhibition, “The earth retains its magical, almost spooky air of both belonging to the cosmos and yet standing apart from it somehow. And the mind, included for once with earth and stars as part of an integrated whole, feels at home at last.” The companion book, also entitled Celestial Nights: Visions of an Ancient Land (Aperture, 2001) won first place in the special trade photography category of the Bookbinder’s Guild of New York Awards in 2001. It will be available for purchase at Audrey’s Museum Store at the Skirball.

Celestial Nights: Visions of an Ancient Land includes powerful images of olive trees illuminated by moonlight and ancient ruins under skies filled with clouds and stars. The works 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. In Folberg’s own words: “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.”

The exhibition is touring worldwide through the Aperture Foundation. The Skirball will be the exhibition’s third venue in the United States, following successful runs at the Cleveland Museum of Natural History in the fall of 2003 and at the Jewish Community Center of San Francisco’s Eugene and Elinore Friend Center for the Arts in early 2004.

Born in San Francisco and raised in the Midwest, Folberg graduated from the University of California at Berkeley in 1972. Since 1976, he has lived in Jerusalem with his wife and family. His recent work has focused on the landscape and architecture of the Near East. Folberg’s photographs of the uninhabited wilderness of Israel were published in his first book, In A Desert Land (Abbeville, 1997). His bestselling book, And I Shall Dwell Among Them: Historic Synagogues of the World (Aperture, 2001), containing photographic studies of the spiritual, architectural and cultural significance of synagogues throughout the Jewish Diaspora, won the National Jewish Book Award. Fifty-nine works by Folberg are in the collection of the Skirball Museum, several of which are on view in the Skirball’s permanent exhibition, Visions and Values: Jewish Life from Antiquity to America. Folberg’s work has been displayed in galleries around the world and is represented, in addition to the Skirball, in the collections of the Los Angeles County Museum of Art, Bibliothéque Nationale, the Smithsonian Institution and the Tel Aviv Museum of Art, among others.

Catalog: Celestial Nights: Visions of an Ancient Land, featuring photographs by Neil Folberg and an introduction by Timothy Ferris, published by Aperture in September 2001 (64 pages, 40 tritone images, ISBN 0-89381-945-X).