Strolling by means of her neighborhood in Ghent, Belgium, in 2020, Bieke Depoorter got here throughout a person named Henk, bent over a telescope, gaze skilled on the moon. “I noticed that I by no means actually search for,” she informed me, describing the prospect encounter. She discovered herself intrigued by this man, who was “comforted by the cosmos.” The Magnum photographer’s new guide, Blinked Myself Awake, combines memoir and picture in a sequence of eclectic riffs on the historical past of astronomy, the apply of stargazing—each novice {and professional}—and the connection between pictures and objectivity. However greater than something, Depoorter is fascinated about observing others observing, animated by the conviction that trying up is intimately associated to the apply of trying inward and backward.
Bieke Depoorter
Henk at his telescope, Ghent, Belgium, 2020
Bieke Depoorter
An astronomer highlights a star with a laser pointer, Mol, Belgium, 2020.
In a diary entry written when she was 14, Depoorter mused on the moon, fascinated by the concept that folks all through historical past had all gazed on the identical object. That night, she took her first {photograph} of the moon. She jogged my memory that the entire stars we see within the sky are snapshots from the previous: photographs of them not as they’re, however as they had been earlier than their mild traveled throughout the vacuum of area—recollections performed out in actual time.
Bieke Depoorter
Three stargazers at Mount Teide, in Tenerife, Spain, 2023
Her true topics usually are not celestial our bodies however folks—a younger man along with his eye, moon-bright and glowing towards the grey scale, mounted on his lens; a nightscape of Henk along with his telescope, framed within the gateway of a chain-link fence; a laser pointer, aimed towards area, that neatly parallels the gable roof of a house; three stargazers readying their tripods within the shadow of a mountain. At a second when ever extra human exercise is oriented towards trying down at our telephones, fixated on screens that mirror ourselves again at us, Depoorter’s topics, with their monastic devotion to what lies above and past them, remind us that each one data begins first with surprise.
This text seems within the July 2025 print version.
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