About Shehzad Niazi

I’m a consultation-liaison psychiatrist and Chair of the Department of Psychiatry and Psychology at Mayo Clinic in Florida, where my clinical work centers on the wellbeing of transplant and cancer patients. I’m also a Fellow of the Royal College of Physicians and Surgeons of Canada, a board-certified clinical informaticist, and, as of 2026, a graduate of Harvard University’s Extension School with a master’s in Creative Writing and Literature.

I was born in Pakistan and was admitted to King Edward Medical College in Lahore at age sixteen, in 1991. A few months later, I bought my first camera. Photography and medicine have grown up together ever since, each informing the other about observation, empathy, and delayed gratification.

My wife and I have been married for twenty-five years. We have two sons — the elder in the second year of an AuD/PhD program, and the younger a newly minted environmental engineer now pursuing a two-year master’s in water resources engineering. We’ve moved around the country, trading the tornadoes of Oklahoma and the snowstorms of Wisconsin for the hurricanes of Florida.

My career and my photography have progressed together. I’ve contributed to publications and provided the images for every story and poem in the print edition of the Brattle Street Review, a literary journal featuring the work of Harvard University affiliates and archived in the Harvard University Archives at Pusey Library. My solo collection, Moveable Feasts, was featured at Jacksonville International Airport and later displayed at the Jacksonville Aviation Authority’s headquarters.

A fun fact: I bought a thirty-one-day unlimited Greyhound bus pass in Karachi, Pakistan, in 2000. And yes, they did have an international office — and the pass was $35 cheaper there! I first encountered America’s landscape that December, crossing the country over thirty-one days by bus, listening to Johnny Cash on my way to residency interviews. Sadly, I couldn’t bring my camera gear; I had to travel light, with winter clothes and books.

I’ve always been drawn to self-imposed challenges. Before coming to the US at age twenty-six, I had never driven a car and wasn’t much good at handiwork — since then, I’ve learned to drive (taking long road trips to most of the National Parks) and taken up carpentry, building cabinets and desks for my library. Another example: in 1989, as a high-schooler, I resolved to read at least one book by every Nobel laureate in literature within six months. It’s now 2026, and I’m still at it — forever falling behind, with no real hope of finishing.

How did you first discover your love for photography?

On my 17th birthday, I joined the photography club at my medical school and bought my first camera, a well-loved Olympus OM-4 with a 35mm lens. My first roll of Kodak TRI-X 400 yielded exactly two properly exposed frames — a 5.56% success rate. I chose to celebrate those two frames rather than be discouraged by the other thirty-four, and I’ve been improving that ratio ever since.

But the images were never really the point. What hooked me was what the camera did to my seeing. Once I picked it up, the world reorganized itself into form and shape, light and shadow. I’d get so absorbed that hours passed unnoticed, the pressures of medical school and every other worry receding into the background. It was less about the photographs I produced and far more about the process of making them. That is what I fell in love with.

I read everything I could find, books and magazines, and my practice became more deliberate — and, with that, more intellectually stimulating. It helped that I improved: eventually I ran a wedding and events photography business and served as president of my medical college’s photography club.

The real gift — the thing that still excites me most — is that photography can never be mastered. You can grow, experiment, and learn new techniques without end. Inspiration is everywhere, and there is no shortage of gifted photographers and visual artists to learn from. Photography opened a whole new world to me — one I’m still, enthusiastically, exploring.

Who are some of your favorite photographers (past or present)?

Naming influences and explaining how precisely they inspire me is a bit like asking how the macros and micros of digested food produced a given brain cell. We live in a densely visual environment: last year, roughly 2.1 trillion photographs were produced worldwide — about 5.3 billion a day, or more than 61,000 every second. The trick is to find the signal amid the noise. Social media is a double-edged tool: it expands one’s reach and eases sharing, yet it also limits what can be shared effectively. A layered image, best seen as a silver gelatin or carbon print, can never be truly appreciated on Instagram, where it becomes a mere pastiche. The same is true of the 6×12 and 6×17 panoramas that are my favorite formats.

I read widely, so there are far too many to name, but a few have shaped how I see. Walker Evans taught me to take the American vernacular seriously — signs, storefronts, plain facades — and to treat words and lettering as part of the visual fabric; he also insisted that a visual education comes as much from painters as from photographers, a conviction I share. W. Eugene Smith shows how much a single frame can carry: precise composition and dramatic contrast marshaled in service of a message, never contrast for its own sake.

For color, I return again and again to Ernst Haas and Saul Leiter — two early pioneers who understood precisely how color evokes emotion. Leiter, a painter first, built quiet, layered compositions through rain-streaked windows and reflections, finding beauty in the overlooked ordinary. Alex Webb taught me to sit with a photograph — his dense, saturated, many-layered frames, where several things happen at once, are held together by light and geometry; his sense of layered composition is something I study frequently.

I fell in love with the panoramic format through Josef Koudelka’s Ruins — those vast black-and-white images of Mediterranean archaeological sites — and traveled to Prague to see the exhibition in person. I admire Josef Hoflehner’s compositional approach, the way silence and solitude and an impeccable play of light and dark give his landscapes a painterly, formal quality. Nick Brandt’s epic, elegiac portraits of animals and a vanishing natural world break my heart. Sebastião Salgado’s use of contrast and his epic landscapes made me fall in love with black-and-white landscape work. Fan Ho’s iconic Hong Kong images — those shafts of light slicing through alleys and stairwells — remain a touchstone for the drama of light and shadow. Stephen Shore’s images of the ordinary American streetscape changed how I look at the built environment. And finally, Anastasia Samoylova, a fellow Floridian, offers a model for photographing this state honestly: her FloodZone series uses lush, seductive color and carefully layered compositions to reveal the slow creep of climate change beneath a tropical paradise, and in Floridas her photographs brilliantly engage with Walker Evans.

It is all one visual grammar: just as a writer is inspired by sentences, a photographer is inspired by cinematic images and film language, by paintings, and by countless other artifacts. I fold what I find into my deliberate practice, where most experiments don’t work — and that is the point. Trying many approaches and failing forward, I learn what worked and what didn’t, hold onto the former, and try not to repeat the latter.

You’ve recently completed a Master’s in Creative Writing and Literature at Harvard. How has studying writing changed the way you approach a photo series?

Writing gave my visual instincts a grammar. I now think of a lazy, slack framing as a run-on sentence; a pruned, distilled image as a spare, sculpted sentence by Ernest Hemingway; a densely layered frame as a passage by Cormac McCarthy or Faulkner, crammed with allusion and containing complex syntax; and a dreamlike image as Virginia Woolf’s lyrical prose. Most often I work in series — constructing images the way one composes sentences with syntax, and sequencing them the way one builds a stanza, attending to rhythm, juxtaposition, emphasis, and the pause between one frame and the next, so that meaning accrues across the whole rather than resting on any single exposure.

This has also made me more experimental. Sometimes I read a poem and try to represent it visually; other times I match a series of images to existing poems or lyrical prose. Lately I compose photo essays under set constraints. For example, each image standing for a line of a sonnet, one serving as the volta, the turn. Now I do far more research into a place’s history, writing about what it evoked rather than merely what the photograph depicts. In this storytelling mode, visual and linguistic syntax complement each other.

Most of all, literature deepened my belief that an image is never finished until a viewer completes it. Just as a poem acquires new life when readers engage with it, I imagine viewers bringing their inner worlds to my images, entering a dialogue to reach their own conclusions. Proust was onto something: “the real voyage of discovery consists not in seeking new landscapes, but in having new eyes.” Reading and writing, it turns out, taught me to see anew.

Several of the photographs included here—from infrared studies of Florida’s coastal landscapes to image-text works—emerged from that exchange between literary and visual thinking. Sometimes a scene reminds me of a poem, an essay, or even a single sentence; I make a note of it and return later with that idea in mind. At other times I encounter a passage rich with imagery and add it to a list of photographs I hope to make one day. What is in the mind often becomes a signal, suddenly visible in the world. A white egret in a marsh recalled Wallace Stevens’s blackbird and eventually became the diptych Two Ways of Seeing the Whitebird. Walking through Venice in winter, I found myself thinking of Joseph Brodsky’s description of a city suspended in a “pearl-laden haze, part coffee and part prayers,” and waited for the weather and light to align. I hope to continue exploring this territory where visual and linguistic syntax meet, creating harmony or tension and inviting meaning to emerge through juxtaposition, rhythm, and inference rather than description alone.

Can you describe a photographically challenging situation that you were confronted with that you were able to resolve on the fly?

As any wedding photographer will tell you, improvisation is the job: we have all used pillowcases as reflectors, bedsheets as backdrops, and a plate on a chair as a makeshift flash stand or bounced light off a wall to conjure studio lighting in an ordinary room. My favorite improvisation, though, came at the Uffizi. I was captivated by the Seven Virtues — seven large panels (six by Piero del Pollaiolo, and Fortitude, one of Botticelli’s earliest works) hung side by side in a room that is always crowded. Their scale and the limited room to step back make the full ensemble nearly impossible to capture in a single frame.

So, I improvised. I switched to a 24mm tilt-shift lens and worked along an imaginary plane running parallel to the panels: at each position I waited for the left two-thirds of the frame to clear of people, made a handheld exposure in low light, stepped along with roughly 25% overlap, and repeated. Later I stitched the frames into one panorama. The tilt-shift kept the verticals true, the overlap allowed a seamless stitch, and because two-thirds of every frame was people-free, the crowd simply vanished from the final image — a technique I have used many times since.

You shoot with Phase One, Cambo, Hasselblad, and Leica. How do you decide which system to use for a given shoot?

Horses for courses. Each system suits a different kind of seeing, and each also carries a story. I set a major goal and, on reaching it, reward myself — so these cameras arrived after landmarks like making Associate Professor, becoming department chair, my first solo exhibition, and graduating from Harvard.

Leica is what I reach for when mobility and haptics matter. By far my favorite is the Q2 Monochrom, though it is hard to ignore the SL’s industrial design or the M11’s rangefinder focusing. These cameras ask to be picked up and used. I was about to sell my SL when my younger son said that if I did not, he would take it up himself — it was the reason he fell in love with photography. For that alone, it will forever remain dear to me. I have since sold my other Leicas, the Q2 color and Monochrom, to fund the Phase One, but the M11 stays. Depending on a few factors, I may add the Q3 43 Monochrom arriving later this year.

Hasselblad I turn to for color and rendering. The XCD lenses, especially the older ones, render images with a microcontrast I cherish, and Hasselblad’s Natural Color is hard to match — now even easier to live with since Capture One added native support for its files. My first was the CFV anniversary kit — still the most beautiful camera I have ever seen — and I later moved to the CFV 100C for its back-side-illuminated sensor, which Steve Hendrix of Capture Integration rightly called a revolutionary value. I travel with it and the M11 when going overseas, since together they fit in a small backpack.

Cambo and Phase One are my tools for the most deliberate work. On the Cambo WRS-1600, I cannot overstate how useful it is to rotate from horizontal to vertical in seconds while keeping the optical center fixed, and its technical-camera lenses resolve detail that is hard to achieve any other way. The Phase One Achromatic was a game-changer: it lets me choose between the visible spectrum in monochrome or the infrared, and above all it slows me down. My family prefers color, though — “The world is colorful, and so should be the photographs,” my wife tells me.

When I want medium-format quality handheld, I reach for the Hasselblad X2D 100C, for its in-body stabilization and portability. In the end, the system I choose depends on what the picture asks for — speed and instinct, or stillness and deliberation.

You work seriously in the medical fields as well as fine art. How do you feel the two practices inform each other?

The two fields share far deeper connections than most people recognize. Medicine attracts empathetic, observant, analytical individuals who must learn to embrace delayed gratification. Those same qualities prove invaluable for a photographer: they let me persist through the inevitable early failures of mastering a new technique, connect authentically with a subject, and craft visual narratives that reveal our shared humanity. In my clinical practice, I watch lives flourish after setbacks and catastrophes, and I watch the best-laid plans crumble in the face of a sudden, incurable diagnosis. It makes me relish the present and engage fully with the world — which is exactly what I try to do through photography. It also feeds the twin themes of memento mori and memento vivere that I have been exploring in my writing, photographs, and photo essays.

In that shared duality — of themes and of fields — visual-arts literacy has made me a better physician. What is the practice of visual art, after all, if not a sustained retraining of focus and attention? Acute, sustained observation and an understanding of compositional principles are metacognitive skills that sharpen diagnostic reasoning and communication; training the eye heightens pattern recognition, while artistic sensibility deepens empathy — all essential to compassionate, effective care. Bergson’s insight, that we see with our eyes only what our minds comprehend, holds in the clinic as surely as it does behind the camera.

Photography reciprocates, too, by serving a healing purpose. Through visual storytelling, we foster a deeper understanding of people, places, and experiences — creating a kinship that cultivates empathy and compassion for one’s subjects, and for one another.

What is your favorite underrated photographic tool? Why?

My tool is not a photography tool; instead, it is a two-ounce foam seat pad — the Therm-a-Rest Z Seat Pad. It weighs little, folds flat in a classic accordion style, and packs small, and its bungee loop lets me strap it right to the top of my backpack. It is supremely handy: I kneel on it to compose a low scene on the ground or the beach, set my backpack on it to keep the bag clean and dry, or simply use it as a seat while I wait for the light. Best of all, its aluminized silver side, meant to reflect body heat, doubles as a small reflector in a pinch.

If you could choose anything you wanted to be in your camera’s viewfinder, where would you be and what would you be looking at?

“Paris is always a good idea,” the line often attributed to Audrey Hepburn, would make an easy answer. But for me it is Venice. I have spent many days wandering its streets and could happily spend weeks on end there. I used to pick a random landmark about thirty minutes away, start the directions on my maps app, and then take the opposite turn each time it suggested a path. I would keep this up for a couple of hour or so and end up in wholly unexpected places, finding my way back to our apartment. Losing myself in the labyrinth of alleys and canals, watching the light shift on the water and across the facades of the palazzi, discovering places off the beaten path — it was truly rewarding. Venice is a city that rewards slow looking, which is exactly the kind of seeing I love best. I am at work on a long-form photo essay of Venice during the pandemic, when it stood empty of people, a sight I hope we will never see again.

Why did you select Capture Integration as your equipment partner?

Just as a job is not the same as a career, a camera retailer is not the same as a technical partner. Over the years I have purchased equipment from well-known retail shops, but the first camera I bought from Capture Integration was a Canon 1Ds Mark II, in May 2008. I was struck by how dramatically different that transaction felt. What impressed me was not just the responsiveness of the sales manager, but how accommodating he was — finding accessories, providing detail, and doing it all for an item that was not even the company’s primary product, at a comparatively low price point. Obviously, one cannot compare a Phase One system to a used Canon body, but I made a mental note: if I ever switched to, or could afford, medium format or technical cameras, Capture Integration is where I would go. And that is exactly what I did.

When the time came, the sales manager took the time to understand my preferences, my shooting style, and my existing equipment before making recommendations. I never felt pushed toward something different or more expensive — only toward what made the most sense. It was clear he was an active photographer who used the equipment he was recommending. Buying into technical cameras, digital backs, and lenses means buying into an ecosystem, and the right advice is worth its weight in thousands of dollars; a wrong-headed purchase can be a very expensive mistake. Even after the sale, he remained available to answer my many subsequent questions. It was, and remains, a personalized relationship — and I truly value that partnership.