Wendy Sue Lamm

Before becoming a photojournalist, Ms. Lamm got her early professional start as a food photographer with the influence of her mother, a pioneering Los Angeles foodie. Her photographs are featured in the cookbook, "Flavor Bombs, the Ingredients and Techniques that make Taste Explode" published 2018 by Houghton Mifflin Harcourt.

In 2005, as the 'Agenzia Contrasto opens a distribution channel in the United States, Lamm returns living and working to her native Los Angeles.

What earned Wendy Sue Lamm her biggest success is a collection of photographs shot in Israel and the Palestinian Territories which was exhibited in various countries and was compiled in the book From the Land of Miracles, published 2005. The book was translated into Italian and Swedish. It is probably the metaphorical dimension of Lamm's photographs that constitute their main feature. There are pictures in which the care for artistic quality is linked with a human message and a contextualization in current political events, as described in the quotations reproduced below.

In 1999, she received, for her photo Holy Water, still published with the Italian agency, the Award of Excellence given by the National Press Photographers Association (NPPA) during the 56th Annual Pictures of the Year Contest.

Wendy Sue Lamm's picture of the clash between Israeli soldiers and Palestinians took first prize in the category Spot News, singles, in 1998. The photo is divided by a pillar in the middle, (...). Both groups are inscribed in a triangular shape; both shapes express movement, but in different ways.

Between 1996 and 2005, Lamm is posted in Jerusalem, in Paris and in Stockholm. Since 1998 she works for the Italianagency Contrasto. In 1997 she receives the first World Press Photo Prize in the category Spot news for a picture published with the Agence France-Presse. That twin picture represents, face to face, Israeli soldiers and a Palestinian, with a thick line separating them. In 1998 she won third prize in the World Press Photo in the category Art for a picture published with the Contrasto agency.

Lamm earned her BA in Humanities from the University of California at Berkeley in 1988 and had her first photojournalism experience with the Agence France-Presse, where she stayed until 1997. From 1988 to 1996 she works in the most various places of the United States, from El Paso, Texas to New York City and San Francisco. In 1994 she is member of the team of the Los Angeles Times that reports on the Northridge earthquake, and some pictures shot by Lamm are part of the collection that, a year later, was awarded Pulitzer Prize for the staff of the newspaper.