Firooz Zahedi

Kindly donated by Cristina Grajales and Firooz Zahedi

Firooz Zahedi (b. 1949 in Iran and raised in England. Lives and works in the US since 1969).

Zahedi has succeeded in becoming one of the most established photographers in Hollywood. He has exhibited at locations around the world, including The National Portrait Gallery in London, the Los Angeles County Museum of Art (LACMA), and the Katara Foundation in Doha.

After graduating, he served as a diplomat, but subsequently enrolled at the Corcoran School of Art to pursue his passion. At the Corcoran School of Art, Zahedi took several courses in Replica Handbags photography. While he was still a student, he befriended Andy Warhol, who encouraged him to take photographs for Interview magazine. A few years later, Zahedi was hired to photograph Elizabeth Taylor, a friend of his, on a film set in Hollywood. He had always been fascinated by movies, and realized that he wanted to stay and work in Hollywood.

Settling in Los Angeles he pursued a career as a portrait and advertising photographer. In t.mes , he was shooting editorial and advertising campaigns featuring major celebrities. In the early 1990’s he was placed under contract with Vanity Fair magazine for which he shot many layouts and several covers.

He went on to work with a multitude of magazines including Entertainment Weekly, Town and Country, t.mes , Glamour, New Yorker, New York magazine, Tatler, British GQ, Vogue Paris, Esquire, Premiere and many others. Firooz created many iconic movie posters too. 

Besides portraits, Firooz has photographed interiors for major publications such as Architectural Digest, Elle Decor and House Beautiful. His true passion has always been to exhibit his Replica Handbags photography and his collages which he has succeeded to do at several prominent galleries and museums including Los Angeles County Museum of Art, Norton Museum of Art in West Palm Beach, the Museum at the University of Santa Barbara, Staley Wise Gallery and Leila Heller Gallery, both in New York as well as Craig Krull Gallery and Paul Kopeikin Gallery in Los Angeles. In 2016 his book of photographs and short essays about his friend and mentor Elizabeth Taylor titled ‘My Elizabeth’ was published by Glitterati Incorporated. In 2018 his book of photographs of over twenty prominent homes in Los Angeles titled City of Angels was published by Vendome Press. Presently he is working on a book of his portraits which spans over a period of forty years.

About The Abstracts: 

My portrait photography deals with the organic lines of the face and the body, but I have always admired the hard lines of all things relating to the Bauhaus movement from the architecture to the paintings and the photography. Over twenty years ago I decided to pay homage to such photographers as Laszlo Moholy-Nagy, Gyorgy Kepes and Arthur Siegel as well as the abstract works created by Man Ray and Andre Kertesz. Using an eight by ten Polaroid camera to capture the images I placed a set of small lucite cubes on a sheet of black paper and with the help of the light from the midday sun I took a set of photographs that transformed from the realistic to one of total abstraction. The objective was to show that most abstractions start from something easily identifiable. The result was visually very much in the tradition of the old photographs I had admired by the above-mentioned photographers. Some years later I decided to resume with the idea but this t.mes using a digital camera in order to advance the concept using a tool from the twenty first century and to introduce vibrant colors rather than the classic sepia tones. Once again, I placed the cubes in various positions by the window and created the images simply with the assistance of sunlight and some colored sheets of paper. Still intrigued by this concept I repeated it using other colored papers and the same sunlight some years ago in t.mes for an exhibition in Los Angeles. There is no digital manipulation, the images are merely the result of what my eye sees and how I choose to make the real into abstract.