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Glenn Mark Losack is a psychiatrist and author of The Bonds We Share: Images of Humanity, 40 Years Around the Globe.
He shares his story and discusses his KevinMD article, “A physician shares images of humanity.”
This episode is sponsored by Tradeoffs, available on your favorite podcast platform.
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Hosted by Kevin Pho, MD, The Podcast by KevinMD shares the stories of the many who intersect with our health care system but are rarely heard from.
Transcript
Kevin Pho: Hi, and welcome to the show, where we share the stories of the many who intersect with our health care system but are rarely heard from. My name is Kevin Pho, founder and editor of KevinMD. Today on the show we have Glenn Mark Losack. He is a psychiatrist, and he wrote the book “The Bonds We Share: Images of Humanity, 40 Years Around the Globe.” Glenn, welcome to the show.
Glenn Mark Losack: Thank you. Thanks for having me. Appreciate it.
Kevin Pho: So we’ll get into your book in a little bit, but first off, can you just share your story and journey to where you are today?
Glenn Mark Losack: I’m a board-certified psychiatrist for 40 years. In about 1994, I decided that there was more to life than being a psychiatrist, a physician per se, and decided to take an eight-month trip around the world. When I got back, I had no job. I had done the usual psychiatric jobs before that, and I came back after seeing the world, especially India, the developing nations. I dabbled in locum tenens. I found that I could work when I want, where I wanted, for how long I wanted, and then the world was my oyster.
When I was 14, I walked into one of the major bookstores, the Strand bookstore on Broadway, and I saw a picture of Srinagar by Cartier-Bresson. It was black and white, and there were Muslim ladies, veiled, praying on top of a mountain and overlooking the Himalayas. And I said I needed a camera, and I needed to go to India. And so from then on, I got very involved in photography. But looking at life in a pragmatic sense, I said, “You know, you really need to make a living, and a good one, so that you can do the things you’re really passionate about.”
So I went to med school in the Dominican Republic, ’76 to ’80. I am board-certified and enjoy being a physician, but there’s a lot more out there in life that most physicians don’t know about. It’s called the world. I found the developing world fascinating as a photojournalist, and my work’s gone to National Geographic, Asian Geographic, numerous magazines, numerous awards. I have over 60 million views online. And the book is a book about the commonality of humanity, what makes us similar. What unites us is stronger than the borders that divide us. At this time, where there’s so much divisiveness, hatred, bigotry, and fighting political parties, I think it’s a timely book, and that’s why I’ve been touting it, so to speak.
So I work part time. I work 12 hours a week as a psychiatrist in telepsychiatry, and a lot of my other time is composing music. I’m a singer, a songwriter, and I’m a photographer. Each year prior to this pandemic, I’ve been going to India and Bangladesh and the Dominican Republic two to three months a year. So it’s been a bad experience for me, I mean, for everybody in the world, but I haven’t been able to use my cameras that much, although I do shoot in Manhattan. I live in the East Village, where there are characters that require being photographed, so I am kept busy.
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Kevin Pho: We’re going to talk about your book and your photojournalist career in a little bit. That perspective that you talked about is very interesting to me, in that you realize that life is more than medicine, and that’s a perspective that a lot of physicians sometimes don’t realize, because medicine is so all-consuming. At what point in your career did you realize that medicine shouldn’t be all-consuming, that we as physicians should have other parts to our life other than medicine?
Glenn Mark Losack: Well, because I’ve always been interested in other things. It started out in my teens, photography, so I didn’t want to leave that to be a doctor. I wanted both, to incorporate it. In 1990, what was it, ’92, a colleague my age had, like, three beepers. The phones never stopped. To get his attention, you had to wait in line. Nice guy. He just croaked. Leukemia, 42, something like that. And I got somewhat scared. Hey, I know stress, and psychiatry certainly can be stressful, as well as any other specialty, I feel. And I just felt that I needed to do more than just practice the specialty.
And locum tenens, it’s a little bit of New York in the background for your audience, locum tenens offered me that opportunity. It said, “Look, hey, we’ll pay you this much, and you can work here,” and then stop and go, and stop and go, and it all worked out. That’s sort of how.
Music is a really big part of me too. So I play piano, guitar, and singing. I fell in love with the Beatles and the music of that genre. So I’m not just a psychiatrist that has a family and goes home every night and sits and watches the news. I’m sorry, so I’m hurting all of your feelings, but, you know, I have a greater time in the New Delhi slum than going to a fancy schmancy dinner somewhere, because I love shooting pictures of the impoverished. I mean, that’s basically what I mostly do. I shoot the unfortunate souls that suffer leprosy, neurofibromatosis. There’s a huge endemic there. There’s a huge pandemic of leprosy in India, I’d say endemic, and no one cares. They just roam around begging until they drop. So I kind of like to help them out. My work has been showcased on my site, and a lot of people have helped the cause. I’ve worked for several organizations, and I kind of think that that’s a nice thing too, aside from helping psychiatric patients.
Kevin Pho: So you’re the author of the book “The Bonds We Share: Images of Humanity, 40 Years Around the Globe.” For those who are watching this interview on video, I’m just going to share some of the images here of some of your work. They’re simply stunning images.
Glenn Mark Losack: Thank you.
Kevin Pho: Now tell us more about your travels, about where you go and how you choose the images you decide to shoot.
Glenn Mark Losack: OK, first question. I’ve been to, in the last five or seven years, let’s say decade, I’ve been to India every year, and Bangladesh, because it’s right near India, so it’s easy to get there, and it’s a fascinating place. Dhaka, the capital, is a fascinating photojournalistic place. The Dominican Republic is where I studied medicine, so I learned a lot about the Haitians that live there, that have escaped their poverty to live in more poverty in the Dominican Republic. So the bateyes are barrios, neighborhoods, ghettos, and that’s what I shoot in the Dominican Republic, and I keep going back, and I’ve established several friendships there.
I’ve been to Tunisia, Morocco, Egypt. I’ve been to Indonesia, Malaysia, to 50 nations in total, but in particular the developing nations. That’s my main interest. I found Europe, it got boring, because it’s church after cement building. In the third world, the developing world, life is outside, not inside. People do what they do outside, so it’s easily accessible to shoot, whereas in Western society, people are pretty much inside, and they’re rich, wealthy, and have rich cars, and that’s great, big backyards. I find that kind of dull. So it’s basically the third world.
Kevin Pho: How do you decide which subjects to shoot in your images?
Glenn Mark Losack: Yeah, it’s based, again, on what I’ve stressed: people that are social outcasts, the impoverished, the poor, the sick, the people that walk around with preventable diseases. There’s leprosy, there’s congenital deformities in the tens of millions, and I’m not talking about a small community. I’ve worked with organizations that deal with leprosy. I’ve given lectures in Vietnam and Bangladesh, India, about leprosy and psychiatry, which I forgot to mention. I’m actually an international psychiatrist, so part of my trips combine both photography and meeting psychiatrists. How do I do that? I think the World Wide Web has allowed me to meet prominent psychiatrists all over the world. So it’s really fascinating, easy. I get to meet them in their homes, and I lecture residents.
The photos are, you can call them dark-edged. You can call them hard to look at, not all. “The Bonds We Share” has been curated by Apollo Publishers, and so it’s mollified. It’s basically palatable for the population, because if you really want to see my work, you go to Flickr, or Google Glenn Losack and go to Flickr, and you’ll see my work that I’m really proud and passionate about. Although I am proud of the book, in order to get a book deal, you have to present your work that’s presentable to, you know, most of the population, and some of it’s real hard to look at. But it’s the truth. I shoot reality. I shoot the impoverished in the world, and that’s closest to my heart.
Kevin Pho: Why are still images so powerful? And maybe share a story about how one of your images made a difference in the areas that you shot it.
Glenn Mark Losack: The single image leaves a lot to your imagination, people’s imagination, and then takes them to a place where emotions, I think, arise. If you’re giving them too much information with the video, well, you know, after you took his picture, he went and swallowed a Gatorade or something. A single picture can touch your heart, because it tells a thousand words, of course, and the rest is up to you, how you perceive it. It’s sort of a projection of what the person gets from the image emotionally.
I have a picture of a kid on the train tracks in Patna, which is in the poorest part of India. Bihar is the state it’s in. Patna is a tricky place. Got to be careful. But I was on the train tracks with my two Nikons, and he was standing there with a little dog, holding it. The kid had no pants on, but, you know, very poor, and that’s touched a lot of people’s hearts. I’ve been sent comments that it’s made them cry, and it attracted a lot of followers from that picture, that image. If you want, I’ll send it to you. It just shows devastation, desperation, and the other side of the world. You know, we’re all well-to-do physicians. We’ve got the comforts, creature comforts, and then you see other people that don’t. And if that doesn’t touch your heart, you don’t have a heart. That’s my opinion.
Kevin Pho: We’re talking to Glenn Mark Losack. He’s a psychiatrist, and he’s the author of the book “The Bonds We Share: Images of Humanity, 40 Years Around the Globe.” Tell us about some of the training you’ve had as a photojournalist. What kind of experiences should one have if a physician wants to get into something like this professionally? What kind of education, experience, and training did you have to become such a successful photojournalist?
Glenn Mark Losack: I’ll tell you, Kevin, you have to have guts. You’ve got to get up close, and it’s really not the camera. I’ve never had a single course of photography, music for that matter. Sort of self-taught. You have to be assertive, aggressive, and be emotionally involved if you want to do photojournalism per se. If you want to shoot your family in the backyard and your dogs and your trips, that’s fine, but that’s not what I do. And get the camera and get out there. Now, if you’re lazy, you’re not going to do it. If you think your work’s bad, work at it. I would tell someone to go out every day and shoot pictures. Look at other people’s work. Get books on what other people have shot.
So, you know, I love the war photographers, McCullin and the Turnley brothers and Nachtwey and McCurry, the Magnum photographers. They sort of influenced me to shoot pain, and that’s what my photography, I think, could be summed up in: shooting pain, humanity. And as physicians, that’s what we treat. And that’s why we need to have a hobby. My advice for physicians is to not just practice medicine, especially psychiatry, because I don’t know if you know this or not, but psychiatry can drain you. One patient can do it, because there’s a neediness, and there’s all kinds of projections onto you of what they’re feeling. So having some life outside of medicine, I think, is absolutely necessary, or else I think you’re going to get dragged down in the murk. You know, what, how much money can you make, and what’s it for, if you’re not enjoying your life?
Kevin Pho: And my final question: What’s your take-home message that you want to leave with the KevinMD audience?
Glenn Mark Losack: I realize the financial demands of people today who have children who have to go to college, although I have other ideas about college myself, but you have to make a living. And, you know, there’s something called affluenza. Not affluence, but affluenza. It’s an illness. I think it’s a mental illness, where we never have enough. We can’t consume enough. We have this invidious consumption, or conspicuous consumption. We have to have what the next person has, the Nikon, the Canon, and the car, or the perfume. All of that is BS, if I can put that in medical terminology.
Yeah, you have to have something you’re really passionate about. If it’s medicine, fine, but you have to temper it. You have to temper it, because you are a human being. And if you just become today’s society, where it’s all computerized, you get five minutes with a patient. It’s just changed. I mean, I can’t, you know, we don’t have enough time, but maybe you’ll have me on again. But, you know, get something you enjoy, because life is short and sweet and sometimes sour. But enjoy what you do apart from medicine, because I know a lot of colleagues are not happy in medicine. Doximity sends me articles every day. You know, doctors are expecting happiness once they get that degree. I feel a little sorry for the new residents out there, but I think they’re in for a big surprise.
Kevin Pho: Glenn, thank you so much for sharing your time and insight, and thanks again for being on the show.
Glenn Mark Losack: Thank you for having me. God bless. Take care.
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