Born in a rural village in western New York, Andrea Baldeck began photographing with a simple 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 school 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.

In the early 1990’s she left the operating room for the darkroom, to work as a fine-art photographer in black and white.   During the following decade, her portfolio grew to accommodate portraiture, still life, and landscapes, as featured in her books The Heart of Haiti  (1996, second edition 2006), Talismanic (1998), Venice a personal View (1999), Touching the Mekong (2003), Closely Observed  (2006), and Presence Passing (2007), and Himalaya: Land of the Snow Lion (2008).  Since 1996 she has exhibited widely in the U.S. and abroad, and her images are found in museums and private collections

Baldeck’s work in progress includes further exploration of the natural and man-made worlds. “Touching the Mekong” and "The Heart of Haiti" are traveling under the aegis of the University of Pennsylvania Museum of Archaeology and Anthropology, as will "Himalaya: Land of the Snow Lion,” currently on display there through March of 2009. The culmination of multiple journeys in the mountains of Asia, this project encompasses culture, landscape and peoples from Ladakh to eastern Tibet. Also on exhibit in Philadelphia, at the Morris Arboretum (November 2008 to September 2009) is "The Texture of Trees," the latest in a series of botanical essays. Projects in development include "Shoreland," an exploration of tidal landscapes and communities, a still life series, "Balancing Acts," and ongoing collaborations with her husband, poet William Hollis. When not in the darkroom, she explores mountain peaks, far-flung islands, fields and gardens, seeking to entrap the transient through the magic of her photography.