A Retired Physician Pursues a New Self Portrait in Photography

“I couldn’t wait to see what my pictures looked like after they came back from the Kodak lab,” he says. “Even today, I can’t wait to see what they will look like on my computer screen.”

When it came time to choose a career, Dr. Agress pivoted to different kinds of images as a physician in radiology and nuclear medicine.

“I never took it for granted that it was no small thing to be looking inside the human body to determine what was causing a patient’s illness,” he says.

Now, after 36 years of increasing work and round-the-clock consultations, Dr. Agress has retired and made his former hobby his new focal point.

Dr. Agress, now 74 and living in New York City, spent the first year and a half of retirement organizing his thousands of photos and immersing himself deeper in the craft. He attended lectures and workshops on photography, read books and “spent endless hours watching online tutorials on the taking and processing of photographic images.”