Travels with Van Gogh & the Impressionists, autographed book

Photographer Neil Folberg was commissioned in 2001 to create a contemporary view of the lives and works of the community of artists from 19th Century France that comprised the French Impressionist painters: Pissarro, Cézanne, Monet, Manet, Morisot & Renoir. Van Gogh also became part of that community through his personal connections with some of those painters, particularly Pissarro, who invited him to Auvers-sur-Oise, where he could be treated by Dr. Gachet.
The photographs in this series comprise a look at the places where these painters lived and worked, but they are also a contemporary photographic treatment of the themes that concerned them, in a style inspired by each of the individual artists. Folberg began the project with the idea that the French Impressionists were influenced by the idea of photography: that painting could escape from the narrow bounds of academic concepts and embrace the transient, fleeting events of both life and nature. Their interest was not confined solely to various effects of weather & light but extended to everyday life, on the streets, in the cafés and guinguettes, in the train stations and countryside. The influence of photography on painting and of painting on photography continues until our day, but this is arguably the moment when the dialogue began.
But photography in the 1880's was a cumbersome process, emulsions and prints had to be hand-made, cameras were large and difficult to handle, demanding skilled operators willing to suffer a fair amount of discomfort to make images. Emulsions were slow and required long exposures of static subjects that belied the promise of an instantaneous vision of contemporary life, so though some of Impressionist painters might have been conceptually attracted to photography, they in fact found it lacking. Degas experimented with it for a couple years and became bored by it. And of course, it lacked color, which was a prime interest of the impressionists.
In this series, Folberg has returned to contemporary France with advanced photographic tools and elements of the original impressionist vision in mind. He combined their vision with his own. Did he succeed? Critic William Meyers of the New York Sun thought so when he wrote: “There has been lively intercourse between painters and photographers since photography came into being, but I am not aware of another project as extensive and thorough as Mr. Folberg's. He immersed himself in the culture and history of late 19th century France and the lives and works of the Impressionists: the landscapes they painted, the living rooms and ateliers where they lived and worked, and their flesh-and-blood descendants. To a remarkable degree he became one with them, if not actually one of them, and the photographs he took are in effect an extension of the Impressionist oeuvre. This work is another turning point for Neil Folberg: It brings us up sharp with its evocation of another time and another place, and its profound questions about originality, tradition, and the estimation of beauty.”