Desert Geometry: Photographing Sinal

FOLBERG, NEIL

Desert Geometry Photographing Sinai Pictures and text by Neil Polberg I began photographing Sinai in 1979. The land was addictive in its power to draw me. Had I not been kicked out by political...

...I begin this portfolio with Egypt, passing through desert landscapes finally to arrive at the ancient walled city that nestles in the hills at the edge of the Judean Desert—Jerusalem...
...My viewpoint enables you to wander through the photograph as I have wandered through the landscape...
...This is the challenge of all landscape work, but Sinai is particularly difficult, for its true beauty is not immediately evident...
...If my photographs evoke something of the feeling of the place and create a sense of its proportion—usually vastness—while giving enough information about the landscape to make it seem real, and Dunes at Bikat Baraka in a sandstorm...
...The trick is to find a point high enough to impart a sense of the environment without losing intimacy, the feeling of having my feet firmly planted on the ground...
...The Al-Aqsa Mosque, considered equally holy, is the silver dome at the other end of the mount...
...The reader must decide if I have succeeded...
...Derive pleasure from being with me in the places I have been...
...The Old City of Jerusalem from Mount Scopus A large section of the wall that encompasses the Old City is seen, sunlit, facing east...
...The beauty of the desert lies less in its small delights—a wildflower, a pool of water—than in the wonder of finding these things in the midst of dryness, in the naked, treeless expanse, impressive precisely because of its vastness...
...Endless peaks jut into the misty sky...
...All forms are softened by the blowing sand rippling the dunes, and all distant detail is obscured...
...Monah where Abraham's near-sacrifice of Isaac occurred...
...There are those who say that the viewpoint of my photographs is distant...
...but I hope it never seems detached, for my involvement with the subject is intimate...
...It is also the site of the Temples and, according to tradition, Mt...
...Nothing less will do...
...The golden dome is the Mosque of Omar, also called the Dome of the Rock, which Moslems believe to be the site where Mohammad ascended to heaven...
...The great pyramids seem to dwarf the vast and sprawling city...
...So I began exploring and photographing in both of these directions as well...
...I want you to use your imagination, to think your own thoughts—in short, to wander and wonder...
...You must be given the opportunity to choose your path as I have chosen mine...
...This doesn't always require height, of course, but more a sense of scale or balance, what John Gardner has called, in a book entitled On Moral Fiction, "a proper balance of detail and generality, the particular and the universal...
...The sun is caught in the sand as if it were reflected on the waves of the ocean...
...Had I not been kicked out by political circumstance, I would have continued working there, never thinking of any place else...
...Quite right...
...Photographs of Israel, Egypt and Jordan by Neil Folberg, published by Abbeville Press, 1987...
...With access to Sinai restricted, after Israel ceded the territory back to Egypt, I drew back to get a wider perspective...
...The challenge of landscape photography is to reduce a limitless expajise to the confines of a two-dimensional rectangle without creating a feeling of confinement within borders...
...It is necessary to give enough information about the environment so that the imagination can extrapolate beyond the next ridge, to create in the image before you, the viewer, a mood evocative enough to make you want to wander in your mind through that image...
...Sinai was, after all, in the heart of the Middle East, a bridge between continents, between the land of Egypt and the land of Israel...
...I don't care to confine you by imposing my convictions on you...
...From In A Desert Land...
...This place I am fortunate to call home, though I would call it that no matter where I lived...
...if, beyond this, the photograph is satisfying as a purely aesthetic object, then I have made a good photograph of Sinai...
...The pyramids at Gizajust outside the metropolis of Cairo on the edge of the desert From a hill in the Western Desert, the nine pyramids of Giza can be seen together, with Cairo and its haze as backdrop...
...Overleaf: View from the summit of Mt...
...The gate in the center of the wall is known as the Golden Gate...

Vol. 14 • April 1989 • No. 3


 
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