Majid Asghari was born in Tehran in 1949 and graduated from the Faculty of Visual Arts in Darmstadt (Germany) in photodesign. Initially, he started photography as a hobby in Iran and mainly dealt with news and portrait photography.
After he was admitted into the Darmstadt Faculty of Visual Arts, Asghari went to Germany, where he was active mainly in studio, advertising and fashion photography rather than news photography.
After he successfully passed college, he worked as Professor Dieter Leister's assistant for a period of two and a half years. “This was the most fruitful period of my training and specialisation,” he says. He believes the period to have been even more instructive than his college years, since the aforementioned professor was not only one of the best specialists in photodesign but also a devoted teacher who was committed to his job and profession. According to Mr Asghari, his collaboration with the professor resulted in joyous professional activities. Furthermore, as a result of the collaboration and of the experience acquired under his guidance, “I succeeded in presenting a serious photodesign project as my dissertation.” The subject of that dissertation was the new German National Library in Frankfurt.
Of his methodology, Mr Asghari says: “I have a great interest in photographing internal spaces, details and angles. I am infatuated with colours, and that infatuation explains why the colours are sometimes exaggerated in my works. Colour filters and heat-measurement devices determining the colours' coldness or warmth make that exaggeration possible.”
After completing his higher education Mr Asghari, as he himself asserts, managed to raise money, through obtaining contracts and taking orders from architects, to buy his favourite “Silvestri”, which has been specially designed for photodesign. After working with a number of German architects he went to Italy to collaborate with interior and industrial designers such as Michele De Lucchi and his colleagues, at their company Studio & Partners.
Works shown: 1 & 2 — New German National Library, Frankfurt (Architects: Arat & Kaiser). 3 — Konrad Conference Hall (Architect: Michele De Lucchi). 4 & 5 — Stuttgart Airport multi-storey parking (Architects: Arat & Siegel).
