Walking through her neighborhood in Ghent, Belgium, in 2020, Bieke Depoorter came across a man named Henk, bent over a telescope, gaze trained on the moon. 'I realized that I never really look up,' she told me, describing the chance encounter. She found herself intrigued by this man, who was 'comforted by the cosmos.' The Magnum photographer's new book, Blinked Myself Awake, combines memoir and image in a series of eclectic riffs on the history of astronomy, the practice of stargazing'both amateur and professional'and the relationship between photography and objectivity. But more than anything, Depoorter is interested in observing others observing, animated by the conviction that looking up is intimately related to the practice of looking inward and backward. In a diary entry written when she was 14, Depoorter mused on the moon, fascinated by the idea that people throughout history had all gazed at the same object. That evening, she took her first photograph of the moon. She...
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