Vassar Quarterly - Spring 2018 - 39

Beyond Vassar

Andrea Baldeck '72
Anesthesiologist to fine art
photographer

Courtesy of the subject

ver the past two decades, photographer
Andrea Baldeck has
mounted 40 solo shows
and published eight
books of striking black-and-white
images. But despite childhood dreams
of becoming a Life photographer, her
first career was in medicine.
That took quite a bit of self-determination. Baldeck's high school guidance counselor discouraged her premed ambitions, saying it would
interfere with marriage and family,
and implying she couldn't handle
college science and math classes.
At Vassar, the multitalented Baldeck majored in music
and spent countless hours in the student darkroom. She
also studied child psychology, which led to a post-college
job at a private preschool outside Philadelphia. Unsure what
to do next, she followed her heart, taking pre-med courses
whenever she could-nights, weekends, summers-all while
working.
Finances were tight. "I was 'rescued' by the Philadelphia
Vassar Club and one particularly stellar member, Anne Morris
Hickenlooper '42 [later Macdonald], who provided me with
lodging and so much more," Baldeck asserts. "Without her
amazing generosity and encouragement, I'm not sure I could
have stayed the course and earned acceptance into medical
school at the University of Pennsylvania." (She has since endowed a scholarship in memory of Macdonald at Vassar, as
well as a scholarship in memory of Lea Trinka Grossi '72, a
friend and classmate who died of cancer shortly after their
10th Reunion.)
The next nine years were predictably rigorous: medical
school followed by residencies in internal medicine and anesthesia. As an anesthesiologist in the University of
Pennsylvania Health System, Baldeck logged 70-hour workweeks, including "night and weekend call, summonses to
the emergency room and cardiac arrests, chronic high stress,

Andrea Baldeck
followed her
childhood dream,
picking up a
camera again and
charting a new
course as a fine art
photographer.

and stiff malpractice premiums."
She still took photographs, even as
a medical volunteer in Haiti and
Grenada, when, as she mentions on
her website andreabaldeck.com,
"camera and stethoscope occupied
the same bag."
"Medicine is a field of great demands, rewards, and sacrifices," she
explains. "The aspects of anesthesia
that appealed to me at a young age-
its fast-paced, life-and-death immediacy-took their toll as the years
went by. Spending long days within
a windowless operating suite, a world
within the world of a hospital, felt
more and more isolating."
A decade later, after repaying
school loans, she started to contemplate changing careers. "So often
what we do for a living comes to define who we are-certainly in the eyes of others, and sometimes our own as well," she observes. "It was unnerving to
shed my career identity, a bit like that childhood dream of
showing up naked at school."
Leaving the hospital was a giant first step; the second was
building a photographic career. "Self-doubt was the biggest
issue: Was I a one-trick pony? Could I chart a new course,
hone and improve latent skills, invest the time and see tangible results?" she asked. "So much of reinvention is the unsurprising, unavoidable requirement for practice-the dayby-day honing of skills."
After five years of intensive work, Baldeck began to exhibit. She jokes that she "traded the operating room for the
darkroom, with a dramatic drop in stress levels. The mood
is mellow, the drama minimal, and if an error is made, no
one suffers."
Freed from a demanding, inflexible schedule, her time
became her own. As a self-employed photographer, Baldeck
travels extensively, has served on many nonprofit boards
(including Vassar's), and spends more time with friends. "It
was as if many windows opened, letting in fresh air and
revealing new perspectives."
She has "no regrets" about changing careers, but
cautions, "Decisions like these are not made on a whim,
VA S S A r Q U A r T E r LY

http://www.andreabaldeck.com

Table of Contents for the Digital Edition of Vassar Quarterly - Spring 2018