Serpent's Chronicle

With his last book, Travels with Van Gogh and The Impressionists, Neil Folberg–already well known as a photographer of landscape and architecture–took his work in a surprising, and successful, new direction, using costumed actors and carefully arranged settings to reconstruct the milieux of some of the world’s most beloved artists. Serpent’s Chronicle represents a further evolution of Folberg’s interest in staged photography: here, the images form a continuous narrative, namely, the story of Adam and Eve, as seen through the eyes of the Serpent. For this ambitious exercise in pictorial storytelling, acted by modern dancers and set in a wild Mediterranean valley, Folberg draws upon the full range of his artistic resources as a photographer in color and black and white, and of the landscape, the human figure, and even the night sky; the result, according to ARTnews, is a series of “lush depictions” that use “subtle anachronism, metaphor, and theatricality to memorable effect.” To memorab