I was born in San Francisco in 1950, but spent most of my childhood in the Midwestern United States, becoming interested in photography around 1966. In 1967 I began studies with Ansel Adams and then enrolled at the University of California at Berkeley to study with William Garnett. Those were tumultuous years at Berkeley but I was oblivious to politics and pursued my photographic and art studies with passion. I was married in 1975 and in 1976 with my wife, Anna, set out for Jerusalem. We intended to remain in Israel for a year but we ended up staying. There I continued to pursue mostly landscape photography, resulting in the book "In a Desert Land". My first major exhibition was at the Musée Nicéphore Niépce in Chalon-sur-Saone, France in 1990/91. In 1992, the Aperture Foundation commissioned me to photograph synagogues all over the world. The resulting book, "And I Shall Dwell Among Them: Historic Synagogues of the World" took some four years to complete. It was the most difficult project that I have ever undertaken, involving interesting but grueling travel to all parts of the world with a ton of equipment on a shoestring budget.I returned to black-and-white work with the series of photographs of starry night landscapes set in ancient ruins and scenes of the Middle East. This work has been collected together in the book, "Celestial Nights: Visions of an Ancient Land" (Aperture Press, New York 2001). The traveling exhibition, circulated by Aperture, was shown in a dozen museums throughout the world, including venues, in France, the U.S. and more recently, the Museum of Photographic Arts in Japan."Travels with Van Gogh and the Impressionists" (with author Lin Arison) includes works done in France during the years 2001-2003. These photographs comprise a look at the places where the French Impressionists lived and worked, but they are also a contemporary photographic treatment of the themes that interested them, in a style inspired by each of the individual artists. My most recent book is "Serpent's Chronicle", published by Abbeville Press in 2013. "Serpent's Chronicle" constitutes the visual and textual record of what the Serpent observed in the Garden of Eden, in a series of staged photographs using modern dancers set in a wild Mediterranean valley. The story has been rewritten based on an ancient oral tradition, but in a contemporary mode. This is a total departure from previous work in many ways but like "Travels with Van Gogh and the Impressionists" it tells a story and uses much staged imagery. This is also the first of my books published in an electronic format.I am currently concentrating on new work and running my gallery, Vision Neil Folberg Gallery, in Jerusalem.