Interview with Dr. Maz Ghani

“My father was an accountant by trade but when he moved to Australia and Canada he worked in
factories because that is 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 end point 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 instinctually will not venture far
into aggrandizing his own artistry. His art invites, lures, 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 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 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 Radiologist 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 Radiologist 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 reach 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 safe guards.
It is suddenly both very dark in the reading room and very enlightened.
Maz Ghani is an expansive persona. He travels and explores permissibly 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 thinks so but because others have said,” 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 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.

Q/A style under four photos
Middle photo is a floral piece of his
Me: Do you consider yourself an artist?
Maz: Often times I do not. I am just doing something I love and feels good.
Me: Take me back to a that moment when you first walked your wife’s garden.
Maz: My wife has a beautiful garden. I just remember going out there curious about angles and how
things could look.
Me: Tell me about your parents.
Maz: My father wanted me to try things, explore things. Before my father diet I got to show him a lot of
what I had been doing with my photography.
Me: What do you wish most to say?
Maz: Explore the arts. It is so very important and wonderful. The botanical world lives in harmony. We
have so much to learn.

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 spring board 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 in it. There are resounding fundamental truths to hear.
Medicine and the practice of medicine is 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 other’s 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 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 allude us
as the days grow long and weary will develop.