Blinked Myself Awake

In Blinked Myself Awake, co-published at the end of 2024 by Hannibal Books and This Book Is True, Bieke Depoorter immerses herself in a personal journey to access the intangible universe of her own memory, beginning with the cosmos itself.

After realizing she felt uneasy looking up at the night sky, Depoorter probed deeper to understand her apprehension. Through her photographs of stargazers, sophisticated observatories, and her research on how photography changed astronomy, she discovered that looking at the stars was like looking at her own memories, which guarded an unspoken trauma. Oscillating between personal texts, historical accounts, and black and white images, Blinked Myself Awake grapples with how, and if, one can seize one’s past.

Blinked Myself Awake is not a photobook. At least, Depoorter doesn’t label it as such. “At first, there were no pictures inside,” she told a full audience at the Fondation Henri Cartier-Bresson in April. As in her 2018 book, As It May Be, she uses text as a means of elucidating the photographer’s experience. Here, in Blinked Myself Awake, Depoorter’s chiaroscuros are paired with candid, intimate accounts to form a luminous map of memory.

“It’s a very personal book,” she said, “it’s really a question of when to publish something very personal. When are you ready yourself, is it ready for the audience, do you really want to show it to the public?” Blinked Myself Awake pursues both the finite and the infinite, from the most profoundly personal to the most public — yet mystifying — phenomenon: the cosmos.

“It all began with meeting Henk,” Depoorter said. In 2020, Depoorter was walking through Ghent in the evening when she saw Henk looking through his telescope. She was struck by “the comfort he felt when looking up.” It led her on a journey to meet other stargazers, tracing a non-linear path across both the micro and macro. The more Depoorter looked into space, the deeper she looked inside herself. After a few years of working on the project, she began to unearth a repressed childhood trauma: “By daring to look into the stars, into the past, memories came back,” she said.

“Looking at the sky is similar to looking into the past,” Depoorter explained. “The stars we see are from a long time ago, maybe even millions of years ago. I started to see the sky and the stars as memories. Maybe the sky is this shared memory we all have that everyone is looking at.”

She began to write down her memories with no clear details, ones she could no longer grasp. Then, she decided to tell her sister — to whom the book is dedicated — and brother about her unspoken, out-of-focus trauma. These reflections contribute to the personal texts throughout the book, in which Depoorter deftly questions how we can remember something that our mind has erased. Is it possible to “remember correctly”? What is impossible to capture with the mind’s eye and the camera lens? 

In a parallel series of texts, printed on black pages, Depoorter vividly reconstructs historical accounts of astronomy, from Galileo to François Arago, the director of the Paris Observatory in the 19th century. She also credits women — erased by history — who paved the way for men to make their discoveries.

In the midst of this research, Depoorter found herself at an astronomy farm in central France. If she spent days drawing the stars rather than photographing them, she thought, maybe it would help her “remember better.” The encounters she had there would change the course of her book. 

Xavier, a photo-historian and amateur astronomer who owned the farm, showed her three books of the Carte du Ciel (“Map of the Sky”). After Arago announced the pivotal invention of the daguerreotype in 1839, 18 observatories around the world began working on an ambitious catalog of the sky, culminating in the Carte du Ciel. Depoorter explains that women weren’t deemed apt enough to photograph, but they could count and measure the stars collected on photographic plates. These “female computers,” as they were called, provided essential yet unacknowledged contributions to astronomical advancements. 

Decades later, the astronomers realized they would never be able to count the last star. “What is very interesting to me,” Depoorter said, “is that those plates are not all digitized, [they] are in the archives of those observatories. So only those plates show some secrets — that some stars were there that have now maybe disappeared.” Reading Blinked Myself Awake, one cannot help linking this to our own memories, guarding secrets in the archives of our minds.

Depoorter later traded one of her cameras for these books, whose graphs make up the opening and closing pages in Blinked Myself Awake. 

This concept of a personal map overlapping with layers of history is present down to her careful design. The book’s size and shape is a reference to the Carte du Ciel, while the cover image is her own drawing she made at the astronomy farm. The photographs are printed on thin recycled paper, rather than thick grammage, so as not to draw attention away from the text. In an unusual reversal, her personal texts are printed on thick photography paper. “For me, the core is the text of the book,” Depoorter said.

The desire behind the Carte de Ciel to map and collect, Depoorter discovered, echoes her own “fear of not remembering correctly.” “Recently, when I was making the book,” she said, “I started to think that maybe that’s why I decided to study photography, because I had the fear of forgetting […] This is why I started to collect things with my camera.”

The photographer similarly records and collects conversations, which she says helps her concentrate. The habit began years ago, “on a day ——— was visiting with his big brown dog,” she writes. The person associated with her trauma is never named in the book. While Depoorter depends on methods of recording as a form of “proof,” her book hinges on what we don’t see, what we cannot photograph, and what remains unsaid. 

In 2023, on a bus trip to the Vatican Observatory in Arizona, Depoorter asks Robert, an optical engineer, if he trusts images. He answers that he keeps a meticulous diary so his family won’t have to rely on images to understand his life.” “It’s what we don’t see that matters,” he adds. He asks her what she sees through the bus window. Depoorter writes: “I describe the Sun shining off of the metal telescope at the top of the mountain. He nods but then points to the bus’s windshield, much closer to us, covered in dirt, grime, and greasy handprints. ‘Did you see all that?’”

A year later, when she was working on the book’s design, she came across her diary, written when she was 14 years old. In it was a black and white picture she took of the moon through her bedroom window. “I want to try to frame the picture, so that the window is visible, including my hand prints on the glass, the Moon in the background,” she wrote, a precursor to her conversation with Robert on the bus years later. Unbeknownst to her, Depoorter’s book was in fact 25 years in the making. 

While Depoorter’s investigation leaves her with unattainable truths, Blinked Myself Awake is also a series of extraordinary connections and life-changing encounters, which she has set out to record and remember on her own terms. The final page of the book shows the cover of her childhood diary, which reads, “The Concealed Secret. The memory will not be gone for all life.”

Blinked Myself Awake is available now on the Magnum Store website.

Depoorter’s solo exhibition “Crossings” opens June 5, 2025 at Fotofabrika in Sofia, Bulgaria.