AS a physiologist, Uwe Ackermann spent his career studying the human heart.

In his retirement, he has taken to pulling on the heartstrings with the images that he captures with his camera.

But he's still working in a hospital.

For his latest exhibition, Dr Ackermann has chosen to hang a series of works at Oxford's John Radcliffe Hospital.

Specifically, they are hanging in the hospital's Link Gallery, which for many visitors is their first entrance to the building.

In describing the show, 'A Place – A Time – A Thought', the former biologist makes an immediate appeal to the heart, quoting American photographer David Alan Harvey's well-worn dictum: "Don’t shoot what it looks like.

"Shoot what it feels like."

Dr Ackermann, who worked as a physiologist in Canada and Oxford, explains: "Technological advances have brought us to a point where it is seldom difficult to produce a photograph of what the world looks like.

"Shooting what it feels like continues to be an enduring challenge.

"My reasons for taking a photograph or making a photograph are sometimes determined by the need to record what it looks like.

"More often I’m driven by the wish to explore the possibility of creating novel visual ideas in a medium in which everything that can be photographed has been or soon will have been photographed."

This exhibition, therefore, includes photos which 'show what it looked like'; photos which capture the intended and sometimes unintended humour of events, and even some montage works which involve cutting up examples of the former to create the latter.

Dr Ackermann, a member of Oxford Photographic Society, says: "The photographs of a man digging up the road, the farrier at work and the woman in hair curlers each record a scene I found compelling because each shows a person free of pose or pretence, completely absorbed in a task at hand.

"On the other hand, Catching the Rays, Racing for Life, Old Window; New Outlook and A Stroll along the Waterfront are visual ideas constructed from photographs that I took for other purposes."

Other photos recall school sports days, a holiday in Cornwall and even Dr Ackermann's time as a sailor.

All of them prompt emotional responses followed by more cerebral consideration.

The exhibition, which opened on June 1, runs until the end of August.