Asgar Ali is a Bangladeshi-American photographer, filmmaker, and materials engineer based in Philadelphia.

I split my days between a lab and the street - both are just ways of paying close attention. My work is documentary and slow, built around three ongoing projects — Behind the Plate, a love letter to my father's thirty years as a line chef; Markets Around the World, a study of the places cities feed themselves; and Fridays at Rittenhouse, a weekly return to the same square. I shoot digital and film, and I believe photos are metaphors that make the abstract concrete and the mundane strange.