OBSERVATIONAL PHOTOGRAPHER

Warm greetings and heartiest welcome to my site! I can describe the aspirational version of myself in five words.

Raconteur: Evocative Images + Words = Memorable Stories

VISION

I capture the significance of events by making evocative photographs of people, places, and things, to tell memorable stories about our collective living.

In addition to my avocation of lifelong learning and photography, I find purpose and meaning in my vocation as a physician, a Consultation & Liaison Psychiatrist (Transplant Psychiatry & Psychiatric-Oncology), Clinical Informaticist working in the area of Applied Clinical Informatics and AI bioethics, Mayo Clinic KERN Scholar, doing Health Outcomes Research. I was a Harvard Writing Scholar focusing on writing in healthcare. I am pursuing a Masters in Liberal Arts (ALM) in Creative Writing and Literature from Harvard University’s Extension School. 

Arts, Humanities and Medicine

Creative arts and the practice of medicine have more in common than people realize. Medical training has aspects that can help with mastering competencies needed for visual arts as well. The profession of medicine often attracts empathic, observant, and analytical individuals who are interested in people and are comfortable with delayed gratification. These traits are an excellent asset for photographers. It enables the photographer to bring out the individuality of its subjects and tell an evocative story to make a more significant point about our shared humanity. Photographers can serve a larger purpose of healing by facilitating an enhanced understanding of people, places, and things. At the same time, visual arts literacy and the ability to acutely see and knowledge of rules of composition help physicians’ diagnostic and communication skills and make them more empathic. 

Words

English is my third language after Urdu/Hindi and Punjabi. I genuinely love reading, and it’s a great way of improving written and spoken language. In that spirit, at age fifteen, I started a project that is still going on: read at least one book by each Nobel laureate in literature. I discovered other writers and poets along the way: Chekov, Somerset Maugham, Keats, Gertrude Stein, Friedrich Schiller, Oliver Wendell Holmes, Sr, Sir Arthur Conan Doyle, Abraham Varghese, and Atul Gawande, among many*. These all are exceptional storytellers from diverse backgrounds and told stories in different genres. I lack their excellent skills in writing, but they and I have two things in common: like them, I am a physician and enjoy telling stories. To improve my medical writing skills, I am a writing scholar at Harvard Medical School. And to learn to write more creatively, I am working my way through a master’s degree in Creative Writing from Harvard University while working at a medical center that is consistently ranked number one in the USA. 

Images

Throughout my life, I have actively pursued means of creative expression – drawings in pen and ink or charcoal, oil and watercolor painting, calligraphy, and then since age seventeen, photography.  I fell in love with photography more than anything else I had pursued earlier. However, it was an expensive pursuit as well. Even without any gear-acquisition syndrome, a not too uncommon affliction of photographers, I realized that I needed a way of funding it. At age eighteen, I started to cover sports and educational events, weddings, family portraits, photos for calendars, and posters, among others. The goal was to generate enough money to continue to take pictures and improve the tools of doing so. Since it was not a business or a primary career for me, I had the luxury of saying no to jobs and be very selective. Additionally, I served as the secretary of the photographic club of my medical school and covered the college events and large group class photos. 

Now, twenty-eight years later, at age forty-six, I remain as passionate as ever about photography as I was when I first saw the results of my first film roll: out of thirty-six, 32 were over or underexposed. Only four were properly exposed but only fortuitously. They were no masterpieces, but one was good enough that I printed it as an 8x10 and felt pretty proud of it. My hit rate is better, and digital has made the exposure assessment easier. After working on my images late into the night, I can wake up two hours before sunrise, grab my gear and walk for miles all day the next day and come back eager to go out the very next day if possible. 

ETHOS

Once a client asked me: what makes you a good photographer? I told him: well, I do not repeat mistakes, and I have made a lot of them while taking the photos, so yes, I am a better photographer as compared to the earlier shoot and will be disappointed if I will not be even a better photographer after this event. Not a reassuring answer if you are the bride or the groom-to-be, but an honest one, nonetheless. I did take the wedding photographs, and they loved the photos. 

That, in a nutshell, is my philosophy: study the work of other photographers to learn new ways of seeing; assimilate those ideas with my style; enjoy the very act of making photographs and be grateful for that; critically analyze my work, learn from it and then do it better the next time. I hope to continue making imperfect photos to detect areas to improve upon and keep growing as a photographer! I am incredibly grateful that I have the passion and the opportunities to use photographs and words to tell my interpretation of the world as I see it. Now with this website – and yes, social media – I can share some of my work, as imperfect as it is – with you all.  

*My favorite writer is Jose Saramago.