Sky of the Beholder

The Starry Nights series, explains photographer Ned Folberg, "began as an attempt to show the sky as our eyes see it." While telescopic images can offer us lush color close-ups of galaxies, they put the viewer at a vantage point somewhere in space. Folberg combines constellations, lunar eclipses, and meteor showers with more earthly scenes--desert landscapes, temples, archaeological sites. In the image shown here, entitled simply Cactus, the stellar display is punctuated by the clustered stars of the Pleiades, or Seven Sisters, which brightly crowd in at the far right. But we are rooted in a landscape of shrub and rock in the Judaean hills, not far from Jerusalem.

An ongoing series (a recent entry includes last fall's Leonid meteor shower), Starry Nights grew out of two very distinct book projects: color landscapes of deserts and images of historic synagogues around the world. Folberg finds a "direct continuity" in his scenes of desert, temple, and sky.

Like all photography, Folberg's work is about light, sight, and technique. If you look up, particularly in the clarity of a desert night, your human eye drinks in starlight. But stars do not lend themselves to snapshots: point a camera skyward and push a shutter, and the film will record nothing. Prolong the exposure, and arcs of light will appear as the stars trace their way around a fixed point in the heavens. Folberg overcomes this problem by mounting his camera on a motorized base in order to track the stars as the Earth turns. And to reproduce what our eyes see naturally, he also uses "exotic techniques": infrared film (as for the foreground here), precious-metal toners, and other "manipulations that push the materials to their limits. "In the best photographic tradition, the result is, of course, more than meets the eye.

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