The life of Firooz Zahedi, an Iranian-American born in 1949, was forever changed when a friend introduced him to Andy Warhol, who promptly ran the young photographer’s work in Interview magazine. In 1976, Zahedi met Elizabeth Taylor, who happened to be having an affair with his cousin. Taylor asked Zahedi to be her personal photographer, boosting his career and inflecting his work with glamour. Zahedi went on to shoot for Vanity Fair, Vogue, and GQ. But he did not get trapped in commercial work. “Firooz is that rare photographer,” says the curator Tim B. Wride, “who allows the sensibility that imbues one aspect of his output to organically infuse his work for the other.” That “other” is art. At Cristina Grajales, Zahedi’s photographic compositions using Lucite cubes, gels, and lighting—icy, prismatic, abstract—seem in league with eternity. —Clara Molot