Brigitte Lacombe
2013 Honoree / Outstanding Achievement In Travel And Portraiture
French photographer Brigitte Lacombe lives in New York City. Her loves are portraits and travel. Brigitte left school to be an apprentice at the black and white lab of Elle in Paris. In 1975, at the Cannes Film Festival, while on assignment for French Elle, she met Dustin Hoffman and Donald Sutherland.
They each respectively invited her to the film sets of “Fellini’s Casanova,” shot at Cinécitta, and Alan Pakula’s “All the President’s Men,” shot in Washington D.C. and Los Angeles. She next worked on Steven Spielberg’s “Close Encounters of the Third Kind,” shot in Mobile, Alabama.
In 1983, she worked on David Mamet’s original production of “Glengarry Glen Ross” at The Goodman Theater in Chicago, directed by Gregory Mosher. Brigitte is still working on all of Mamet’s productions.
In 1985, Gregory Mosher came to New York City as the artistic director of Lincoln Center Theater, and asked her to be the first and only staff photographer. She remained at the LCT for 7 years.
Brigitte works as a special photographer on the films of Martin Scorsese, Mike Nichols, Sam Mendes, Michael Haneke, David Mamet, Quentin Tarantino, James Gray, Spike Jonze, and many other directors.
She contributes to Vanity Fair, Acne Paper, The New Yorker, The Financial Times Magazine, WSJ magazine, The New York Times Magazine, German Vogue, Nowness, New York Magazine, and other publications.
She has been a contributing photographer for Condé Nast’s Traveler since their first issue in 1987.
In 2000, she won The Eisenstaedt Award for Travel Photography.
In 2010, Brigitte received the “Art Director’s Club” Hall of Fame Lifetime Achievement Award for Photography.
Since 2009 until today, Brigitte has been working on an ongoing project for The Doha Film Institute and Doha Tribeca Film Festival in Qatar – a collection of over 250 portraits of international filmmakers and actors called IAMFILM, focused on film-makers from the Middle East region.
This year the Qatar Museums Authority commissioned a portrait photography project called Hey’ya Arab Women in Sport, which was recently exhibited at Sotheby’s Galleries in London during the 2012 Summer Olympics to rave reviews.