Photographs by Bieke Depoorter
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 reminded me that all of the stars we see in the sky are snapshots from the past: images of them not as they are, but as they were before their light traveled across the vacuum of space—memories played out in real time.
Her true subjects are not celestial bodies but people—a young man with his eye, moon-bright and glowing against the gray scale, fixed on his lens; a nightscape of Henk with his telescope, framed in the gateway of a chain-link fence; a laser pointer, aimed toward space, that neatly parallels the gable roof of a home; three stargazers readying their tripods in the shadow of a mountain. At a moment when ever more human activity is oriented toward looking down at our phones, fixated on screens that reflect ourselves back at us, Depoorter’s subjects, with their monastic devotion to what lies above and beyond them, remind us that all knowledge begins first with wonder.
This article appears in the July 2025 print edition.
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