But soon after, I relocated with my wife to Israel, where I began to explore the vast expanses of the Sinai Deserts. Few people today experience wilderness on this scale—it was not a national park, it was not a designated and controlled wilderness area, it was boundless desert without any safety net. The scale had a profound effect on me. It felt like passing through a doorway to infinity. Once I had been struck by that I had to deal with it directly, without the anchor of a human presence. So I photographed a wilderness without people. Is this spiritual? Yes, but it didn't come from me, it comes from not running away—from not being afraid to be alone on what felt like the edge of the world. I spent hundreds of nights sleeping on the ground. No tent.
Artsy: How did you settle on this approach, which incorporates elements of spirituality and surrealism, over a more documentary approach to landscape?
NF: I dreamed of creating something like the images that later became “Celestial Nights,” which gave the feeling of someone standing on the horizon looking at the universe beyond. To make those images, I had to wait for someone to invent the personal computer and Photoshop, but when it came I was ready for it. I knew what to do with it. That was the enabler for the “Celestial Nights” imagery and I pushed it to its limits at that time. I made long exposures of the night sky, tracking the movement of the stars with my camera on a motorized base and combined them with images made at dusk and night. You could make these images and see them on your computer screen, but digital printing processes at that time were distinctly low-quality. Everyone then looked at their computer screens and said, “Wow, that's wonderful but how do we get it out of the computer?”
A photographer by the name of Dan Burkholder came up with a method for generating half-tone negatives that could be used to make contact prints on silver gelatin paper, and that was what I did. I think I was the first to make these kinds of celestial–terrestrial photographs. Now I can also make prints using the brilliant archival digital printing processes, but then it was impossible. Many people think that the photos have a surreal quality. Is this surreal? To me it feels like reality in its most profound form.