LaCombe, Brigitte

French

BiographyBorn and raised in France, Brigitte Lacombe left school to be an apprentice at Elle magazine in Paris. In 1975, she met Dustin Hoffman and Donald Sutherland at the Cannes Film Festival, and they invited her to photograph on the sets of Fellini's Casanova and All the President's Men. Following that experience, she began to work as a still photographer on film productions, and over the decades, she has photographed behind the scenes on films by directors such as Martin Scorsese, Steven Spielberg, Mike Nichols, Sam Mendes, David Mamet, Spike Jonze, and Anthony Minghella. In the process, she has also made numerous portraits of actors, typically photographing them in a setting that is closed to anyone but Lacombe and the sitter. For seven years, in the late 1980s and early 1990s, Lacombe worked as the staff photographer for the Lincoln Center Theater in New York City. In 1987, she became a contract photographer for the magazine Condé Nast Traveler, completing assignments around the world.

Throughout her career, Lacombe has also been active as an advertising photographer. In 1988, The Gap launched an advertising campaign titled The Individuals of Style, for which it commissioned leading photographers to create black-and-white portraits of famous cultural figures. Lacombe chose to photograph actor John Malkovich. Intended for display in bus stop shelters, the photographs from the campaign are printed at a large scale and overlaid with the Gap logo. Along with the photograph by Lacombe, the Museum of Contemporary Photography's collection includes portraits commissioned by the Gap from five other photographers. These selections were exhibited at MoCP in 1994. Photographs from campaign were also presented at the National Portrait Gallery, London in 2007.