FROM RADIOLOGY TO BOTANICAL PHOTOGRAPHY

His images are haunting, which is an odd and harsh word for flowers to portray. Elusive like a Wednesday and catalytic like colors ought to taste, Maz Ghani’s photographs make the viewer look again with an unsettled curiosity.

“My father was an accountant by trade, but when he moved to Australia and Canada, he worked in factories because that was what jobs he could get, being a Middle Eastern foreigner. He did enjoy photography, and he told me over and over to approach the world with curiosity.” Maz spoke of his upbringing and a father whose daring explorations defied being just secure or safe and risked shame. Maz Ghani would take his curiosity and his cultural pressures to succeed and enter the world of Medicine as a Radiologist. Still, that endpoint is too flat a photograph. Maz’s life choices would layer onto itself like its own series of scanographs, each speaking concertedly about arriving at a moment in his life with art at the helm.

“Some of them look almost three-dimensional,” he admits, quickly understanding something that has to be admitted about his photographs, but he keeps a kind of reserve. Maz instinctively will not venture far into aggrandizing his own artistry. His art invites, lures, and seduces the audience into conversations over their own curiosity.

“I love it when the spectator comes up and asks me about a photograph, like whether the flowers are live or dried or if they are painted,” he engages. Remarkably and humbly, he keeps labels that might limit the natural organic expansiveness of his art or the decompression of his hobby at bay. He IS an artist, and yet he takes care to be just a person enjoying a passion more fully each day, sharing it if asked and approached.

I muse openly how I should compliment by attempting to capture someone who captures something while himself wandering through life. Surprisingly, Maz Ghani says something that has grown clear in his life’s garden.

“I think I am still growing,” he reflects, and I know he is arriving at a center he has always had. I like that most about his garden.

“Do you see art in practicing as a Radiologist?” I try to explore a parallelism, thinking there is one.

“No, I keep it separate,” he covets as if one world cannot be allowed to taint the sanctity and reprieve of the other. “Work is very stressful,” he claims commonality with all physicians harboring the burden to help through knowledge and precision to elucidate. “By now, I go through radiographic reads methodically. I am a perfectionist, and I don’t want to miss anything. I don’t want to think I missed something and it harmed someone,” his voice trembles a bit with the gravity of admitting that fear out loud.

Immediately, I think we in medicine have not understood something about Radiologists deeply enough. We have not seen the pressure to do no harm by missing an opportunity to discern something in an image that could help explain what may harm someone or what is harming someone. I feel immediately the weight Radiologists feel, and I think that is the haunting air in the otherwise ethereal-looking flowers. This elusive idea of awesome responsibility is the weight that conjures the need to run away after the job is done and seek refuge in art.

Still, I press, wanting to discover why a story of a Radiologist turned dramatic photographer seems too perfect. “Do you see any parallelisms between your photography and Radiology?” I’m unclear why the two seem akin but not exactly.

“No, I mean, we don’t take the images in Radiology. We interpret them,” he reminds me. Suddenly, I see it like a push of a button or a whisk through a gantry. The photo negative of Maz’s passion is his profession, and the photo prints are of his hopes and safeguards.

It is suddenly both very dark in the reading room and very enlightened.

Maz Ghani is an expansive persona. He travels and explores, permissively curious to see things in ways that invite experiencing and interpreting. He is aided and inspired by his parents (now deceased), his uncle, a constructively opinionated painter, his wife, a trained Forensic Pathologist and mother to his garden of subjects, and his son, a budding journalist and film artist. He is effusive like the sun on his own garden of supportive family and friends. “My wife has a beautiful garden, and my son is an amazing artist, but not because I think so, but because others have
said so,” he beams.

Come into Maz Ghani’s garden and get a little lost.

“I encourage everyone in Medicine to explore the arts. It’s so enriching and it gives rest and outlet and collaboration and conversation,” he beckons and mentors against burn-out and the exhausting depletion of accountability and burden of sorrow in medicine.

I am already engulfed in the maze of Maz’s garden when he says this, and I am surrounded by flowers photographed from the left, from the ground up, from a magical place suspended by faith and air. I think after a stroll, I can go back to being responsible for answers. Beauty becomes our breath and girth to endure the bad shadows, lurking abnormalities shrouded in mystery, and the weight of unknowns and unexplained things.

A Call to Arm Ourselves

If the last thing I wrote in the world had to be poignant, I would argue that human persistent existence begs the possibility of constant renewing revolutions. We are at a springboard in a revolution, given the global pandemic. This year is launching us forward and around and back again. It is near tangible the refreshed humanity and human joy within it. There are resounding fundamental truths to hear.

Medicine and the practice of medicine are perfectly placed at the level of fundamental truth. Mortality begets illness and illness begets aid. Maz expresses perfectly two thoughts, sharing the stress of weighty patient-focused care and the need for release by seeking harmony and art found within nature. In his broad and beautiful vantage, Maz calls to art those in medicine.

“Create something, even if nobody sees it,” he welcomes.

I asked Maz where he is heading in medicine and in art. “Nature provides us with abundant opportunities to explore, and there is uplifting synergy when you collaborate with others,” he elaborates, “and I hope one day to open a gallery of sorts that has a curated gift shop, a garden for my wife’s creations and for others’ exploration and inspiration, and a space for conversation and creation. The destination I hope allows others to reconnect to nature.”

Maz is calling us all in medicine to remember our humanity and to use art to connect constantly with it. “Through the chaos of life, our lives are intertwined, braided by emotions and paths crossed, convoluted and complex,” he ponders.

If we are already caught in a riptide recycling our assets and aspirations, art is waiting and surviving the beating that becomes caring these days. Arming ourselves with art will find us all meandering through some field of flowers, extracting the clarity of our own calling.

I hope Maz builds this gallery and other physicians or professionals help and contribute, inadvertently or with violent intention. Through art and that photo negative exploration, the fundamentals that elude us as the days grow long and weary will develop.

More About Maz

Dr. Maz Ghani was born in 1969 and moved to the US in 1995 after living in Australia and Canada. A Radiologist by training, Maz gained an interest in botanical photography several years ago while exploring his wife’s colorful gardens. He uses a combination of photography and scanography to compose the botanical layouts and is inspired by nature’s diversity. His works have been published in Travel and Leisure Magazine, Black and White Magazine, and an article, “Art from the Garden” in Berkshire Magazine. His photos have been included in the SLO Museum of Art Juried Exhibition, Proud+ 2021 Juried Exhibition, the iMotif Juried Exhibition, and the Contemporary Online Art Gallery.

STOCKISTS

Global
Anthropologie.com
ArtfullyWalls.com

California
San Luis Obispo Botanical Garden gift shop, San Luis Obispo, CA
Rhonda’s Relics, Arroyo Grande, CA
Saatchi Art, Santa Monica, CA

Singapore
The Artling

PRINT/ONLINE MENTIONS
8/2022 “Your Best Shot,” Travel and Leisure Magazine, p. 180
5/2021 “Art from the Garden,” Berkshire Magazine, pp. 42-45
1/2021 Five photos published in Black and White Magazine (bandwmag.com)

AWARDS/HONORABLE MENTIONS
2/2020 Berkshire Magazine (Wild Places contest)
Honorable Mention – “Fleur du Sol”
Honorable Mention – “Busy in the Berkshires”
12/2019 Downtown Pittsfield Photography Contest
Honorable Mention – “Falling for Freedom”
12/2019 Contemporary Online Art Gallery (All Planet Earth competition)
Best in Show – “Standing Tall”
12/2019 Motif Collective (Symmetry contest)
Honorable Mention – “Shoe Heaven”