Whether as musician, physician, or photographer, Andrea Baldeck has braided a career with strands of art, science, and wanderlust. Born in a rural village in western New York, she began photographing with a box camera at age eight, imagining herself a Life photographer canoeing through the jungle to meet Albert Schweitzer. This interest and dream pervaded years of musical study at Vassar, medical studies at the University of Pennsylvania, and practice as an internist and anesthesiologist. On medical trips to Haiti and Grenada, camera and stethoscope occupied the same bag.

Though she exchanged operating room for darkroom in the early 1990's to work as a fine-art photographer in black and white, her curiosity and passion for detail and an ordered vision has continued to help her, this time in an exploration of portraiture, still lifes, and urban and rural landscapes. Among this work, which has been widely exhibited, are the images of artists such as Rudi Staffel and women wearing the jewelry of Breon O'Casey, the studies of proud Haitians that became The Heart of Haiti (1996), an embrace of the world's almost hidden details that became Talismanic (1998), an intimate involvement in the life of the city of Venice that became Venice a Personal View (1999), and, now, this flooding through the rivers of southeast Asia that has become Touching the Mekong (2003).

Baldeck's work is always in process, looking for new rhythms and tonalities in the lights and shadows of the natural world: in a show called Closely Observed that has been at the Morris Arboretum in Philadelphia and travels to Cleveland and Washington; in a new collection, called Walls / Windows / Doors, a study of the visual effects of apertures and barriers through which the artist and the scientist seek passage; and in an ongoing series entitled The Poet. The latter is an exploration of how artist and work reflect each other, often prismatically.

Baldeck wanders through the streets of Venice or the ancient temples of Angkor; she treks up the Himalayas and to the top of Kilimanjaro and across the Atlas Mountains and the hills of Tuscany; but she has also revealed the wonders that lurk beneath the pine trees in a backyard or within an opening bud. She explores and hears the tonalities of the not-yet-seen and in her darkroom operations produces the prints that fill these books, exhibitions, and collections.