Harv Greenberg is a radiologist who’d rather shoot photographs.
After years in a windowless office poring over X-rays, he bolted out the door, into the world, equipped with his Nikon camera, ready to shoot anything, anywhere, in any situation that might stimulate him.
“The crazier the place, the more excited I get,” he says.
Like the thigh-high grass in India, where he stared down a Bengal tiger– one that wandered slowly up to his jeep until it was 20 feet away.
“My guide said: ‘Don’t look straight at it,’ but how could you not?” he says. “I got that shot, because I live for stuff like that.”
Or the adolescent, 200-pound gorilla in Rwanda, where Greenberg was on one knee, sharing the same ground as the animal he wanted to shoot.
“He was right in front of me – he punched me in the leg, and before I knew it he was gone” he says.
Then there was his time in Paris, an enviable experience by any stretch of the imagination:
“One morning I woke up before dawn in Paris and thought: ‘You know, I m going to grab a taxi. And I went to the Champs-Elysees and the Arc de Triomphe and started walking until past sunrise.”
He had the City of Light all to himself. “I wandered around, looking at most beautiful architecture in the entire world,” he says. “Paris is just unique – I photographed the Seine and Notre Dame.”
He did the same in New York City, slipping into Poets Alley in Central Park at dawn. Then, to Santorini in the Greek Isles, its homes and churches painted bright white by the women of the town while their husbands and fathers are off to work.
“It’s all about finding inspiration,” he says. “My whole journey’s defining moment is to take my aspirations and desires and see the world, and I want to inspire other to do the same.”
Toward that end, he hopes to open a gallery near Marina Del Ray, Calif., where he’s currently based, perhaps within five years. In the meantime, his prints are available on his website.
That’s probably for the best, anyway, since he’s sure to be out the door shortly:
“I’m going to Patagonia, and to hike the Andes in February, then to London in March, the Maldives in April, then the Columbia River Gorge in Oregon, and then three weeks in Dubai and the Sahara Desert,” he says.
All the while, he’ll be making the most of it.
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