In Look at Me, Photographer Firooz Zahedi Reflects on Decades of Photographing Hollywood
It’s fitting that Firooz Zahedi loved cinema as a child, because his own story smacks of Hollywood magic. Before emerging as a major photographer in the 1980s and ’90s—when he shot the likes of Jennifer Lopez, Angelina Jolie, Samuel L. Jackson, Cate Blanchett, Meg Ryan, Meryl Streep, Nicole Kidman, and Barbra Streisand—he suffered a stuffy childhood in mid-century Iran, boarding school in England, and a job at the Iranian embassy in Washington, D.C. (his cousin, Ardeshir Zahedi, was ambassador to the United States) before enrolling in art school.
Then, two extraordinary encounters changed the course of his life: A friend introduced him to Andy Warhol, who ran Zahedi’s photographs in Interview; and in 1976, Zahedi met Elizabeth Taylor (she and his cousin were having an affair), and he worked for a time as her personal photographer. Over the ensuing decades, between assignments for Vanity Fair, Vogue, GQ, and other glossies, Zahedi established a reputation for his glamorous portraits and amiable bedside manner. (As it turned out, his stint as a diplomat came very much in handy.)
With a new book, Look at Me, arriving this month from Pointed Leaf Press, Zahedi spoke to Vogue about his life in pictures.
First, when and why did you decide to put this book together?
I’m getting old! (Laughs.) I’d wanted to do a book before—I sort of put one together years ago that I took around to a couple of publishers, but it was just photographs. I have a ton of books by [Richard] Avedon, [Irving] Penn, [Cecil] Beaton, but I always wanted to know, what happened that day? Or, why did they do it in this manner? What was the atmosphere like? So I thought I should put some distance between myself and the memories of those photo shoots, so that I could go back to them and get a little bit more nostalgic about them. Ultimately, we decided to keep the book quite clean, with just a few lines to explain my relationship with each person or what I thought of them, and we added some behind-the-scenes images and thank-you notes that people had sent me. I thought, I’ve got all these photos of these various talented celebrities, but I’ve got to also prove that there was something beyond the photographs. There was some sort of a relationship and some good feeling between us.
Reaching back a bit, I’m curious about your transition from working at the Iranian embassy to becoming an art student. What was it that you were craving, professionally and creatively?
It goes all the way back to my childhood. I’d always wanted to be an artist in some capacity; I was good at drawing, even as a little kid. I came from a very conservative family—they were in the government and the military in Iran—and when there was a coup, my father became a political prisoner, and I had to visit him in prison as a child. It was all pretty traumatic, but my escape was Hollywood movies; to me, that was a safe place where people were colorful and well-dressed and kissed each other and had happy endings. I wanted to be there. Much later, when I graduated from Georgetown University, I became a diplomat and worked under my cousin, who was the ambassador to Iran. It had come to a point when I thought, I’ve done it—I’ve given my family what they wanted. I can no longer keep up this façade. It was great sitting at a dinner table in black tie in my early twenties with Paulette Goddard or Joan Fontaine or whoever, but I wanted to be outside of the embassy environment. If I was going to be sitting with a movie star, I wanted it to be in Hollywood. So I went and applied to the Corcoran School of the Arts and they accepted me. When I told my family, they were all shocked, but I was so determined to do it that they said okay. They were waiting for me to fail—the arts were just not part of their vision—but that’s the way they were raised.
I was so happy at art school. I was ecstatic. It was the best period of my life, going to that beautiful Beaux Arts building. Photography was one of the courses I had to take there, but they were doing very high-end, fine-art photography, and I just wanted to take beautiful pictures. I was good at taking nice portraits of people—friends I had, family, whatever. But because I got to know Andy Warhol through a mutual friend, he gave me the opportunity to get my work published in Interview magazine. And then, because Elizabeth Taylor became a friend, I felt I had people who would be supportive of me. So I stuck with it, though I wasn’t making much money, and then Elizabeth, realizing I wasn’t making much money, brought me out to Los Angeles when she was doing a movie, and I hung out with her for six weeks as her personal photographer. It was really exciting.
