The Los Angeles County Museum of Art (LACMA) presents Elizabeth Taylor in Iran: Photographs by Firooz Zahedi, featuring thirty-two images taken in 1976 during Elizabeth Taylor’s first and only visit to Iran. Accompanying her was Firooz Zahedi, today a successful Hollywood photographer but then a recent art school graduate just learning his craft. Iran provided an exotic and engaging locale for Taylor, a tireless global wanderer still at the height of her fame. For Zahedi, who had left Iran as a child and only returned twice before, this was a reintroduction to his own country, which he experienced not only through the camera lens but through Taylor’s eyes. This visit in 1976, prior to the Islamic Revolution, proved to be his last to the country of his birth.
Before Brittany, before Michael, before Lindsay, before today's Hollywood headline grabber, there was Elizabeth. From her first staring role in National Velvet (1944) until her recent death, she was never out of the news. Those amazing eyes, her skin, her hair, the sheer impact of her beauty, she was a femme fatale more famous than Cleopatra. Cleo only married Caesar and Anthony. Liz married seven times and collected ten times the loot and gathered 100 times the headlines.
But it's possible that she was never photographed more beautifully.
Elizabeth met Iranian-born photographer Firooz Zahed when he was an art student in his 20's. His cousin, Ardeshir Zahedi, Iran’s ambassador to the United States in the mid-1970s was the then companion of Ms. Taylor and introduced the two.
“I was calling into art school saying, ‘I’m sick,’” the photographer recalls, grinning. “Then I took Elizabeth to the National Gallery, and as we were leaving there were all these photographers. The next day it was on the cover of The Washington Post or something, and I had to make an explanation at school. I passed all my exams anyway.” An opportunity to photograph his new friend followed soon thereafter. “My cousin wanted her to go to Iran for this inaugural flight on Iran Air, and he invited a lot of society people—[Elizabeth] said she would go if I would go with her,” Zahedi says. “I hadn’t been there since the age of nine—I didn’t really have any desire to go back … it wasn’t really a place to be an artist.” (Interview in Vanity Fair).
'But together, the two friends saw Iran through fresh eyes, acting like “a couple of tourists,” Zahedi says. “There was no pressure, just lots of fun. No one recognized her.” He snapped photographs of her in teahouses and in Persepolis—in front of the tent city built for the 2,500-year anniversary of Iran’s kings and monarchies, now a “weathered symbol of decadence left over from the Shah’s regime,” Zahedi says. “I have one shot of her standing in front of the mosque in a chador—you’ll notice there’s a man going in and a woman going in. Now in Iran, you can’t do that anymore.” (Interview, Vanity Fair.)
Grouped in narrative fashion, some of the photographs simply document the people and places of Iran—not all feature the actress as tourist. Taylor purchased a traditional tribal outfit in the Isfahan bazaar; dressed in this colorful costume and in full make-up, the film star posed as an Oriental odalisque, an especially suitable persona for one who was herself a male fantasy.
The exhibition is on view until June 12, 2011.
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