Andrea Baldeck – författare

Poised in delicate, often hazardous balance with the liquid natural world the fabric of the man-made city rises out of the water and is reflected in it. The earth of Venice, a tissue of alluvial silt, is upheld and given form by a vast subterranean endoskeleton of wooden pilings supporting buildings of splendor with their feet in the mud. The air of Venice carries both heat and swells from North Africa's deserts and envelops life like liquid gauze. And fire, the most volatile of the four elements, has both destroyed and redrawn swaths of the city and fed the industry and commerce of a trading nation.

The Himalaya, Asia's jagged backbone, lured photographer Andrea Baldeck on four journeys covering thousands of miles from northern India to western China, the distillation of which is Himalaya: Land of the Snow Lion. This volume opens a window onto an ancient enduring culture, bound by shared ethnicity and religion and challenged by daunting geography. Portraits, landscapes, architecture, and still-life images convey the texture and rhythm of this mountain life, which is ever more threatened by the forces of geopolitics, migration, and modernization. In a series of succinct essays accompanying the images, the artist invites the viewer to imagine aspects of life and travel in a region where a remote, starkly beautiful environment test and tempers all who call it home.

Touching the Mekong is a visual exploration of contemporary life in those Southeast Asian countries that border, or contain within their borders, segments of the region's largest river, the Mekong. Freelance photographer Andrea Baldeck, who traveled throughout the area in 2001-2002, presents 150 compelling images that encompass portraiture, landscapes, and still lifes, along with a brief essay that explores some of the factors that led her to explore this terrain with her camera. The content and juxtaposition of these visual moments arrest the eye and kindle the imagination, with images grouped to create visual resonance rather by country or category. They stimulate questions and invite further exploration. All were taken on location, unstaged, in natural light. Baldeck used no props or supplemental equipment beyond two 35mm Leica cameras. This timely photographic study provides a visual reintroduction to lands now at peace, and in transition. It will appeal to archaeologists interested, for example, in the ruins of Angkor in Cambodia; anthropologists concerned with multiple ethnic groups and cultures, some threatened by modern development, tourism, and geopolitics; students of Buddhism, Hinduism, and Confucianism; and readers fascinated by the handicrafts and architecture of the region and especially by fine art photography.

Poised in delicate, often hazardous balance with the liquid natural world the fabric of the man-made city rises out of the water and is reflected in it. The earth of Venice, a tissue of alluvial silt, is upheld and given form by a vast subterranean endoskeleton of wooden pilings supporting buildings of splendor with their feet in the mud. The air of Venice carries both heat and swells from North Africa's deserts and envelops life like liquid gauze. And fire, the most volatile of the four elements, has both destroyed and redrawn swaths of the city and fed the industry and commerce of a trading nation.

The photographs in this book spring from a respect for the logic and clarity of science and the order and variety of the natural world and from the photographer's fascination with the array of line, form, and pattern that occurs in our daily lives. Talismans are endowed with magic virtue, charms diverse in their forms, holding the powers of healing or good fortune or potent magic, tinged always with a hint of the occult, the mysterious. Drawn from the everyday world, changed through the alchemy of photography and the eye of the artist, these images remind us that sometimes the quotidian is the strangest of all.

More than two centuries since enslaved laborers of West African descent evicted French colonials from Haiti's troubled republic, the lot of rural Haitians has changed little. Life is tied to the exhausted land, worked with a hoe to the cycle of seasons. Inhabitants in the Artibonite Valley, who survive on subsistence forms, live with dignity in the face of deprivation, and find solace in a spiritual synthesis of voudoun and Christianity. Andrea Baldeck came to know this world as a volunteer physician at the Valley's Hôpital Albert Schweitzer during the 19080s, returning as a photographer in the mid-'90s. Her images reveal hope, resignation, forbearance, pride, strength, and love. These unforgettable portraits are mediated only by trenchant Creole proverbs, a distillation of the Haitian experience.

Closely observed explores the infinite variety and beauty of the botanical world. Andrea Baldeck sequences photographs in sumptuous black and white to beguile the viewer with variations on the theme of leaf and flower, fruit and seed. The aesthetic appeal of a mute yet deeply expressive world imbues the 178 tritone plates. The book presents a garden of the imagination that invites the eye to linger, marvel, and enjoy.