An adventurous photojournalist, Maureen Lambray’s work has appeared in such publications as The New York Times, Rolling Stone, Esquire, Time and Newsweek.  She studied photography with Andre Kertesz in New York and began what was to become a career punctuated by “firsts.” Following an electrifying photo essay on prison and refugee camps along the Cambodia/Thailand border during the fall of the Khmer Rouge regime, Lambray was invited in 1979 by Yassir Arafat to Beirut where she compiled one of the first in-depth looks by an outsider into the Palestinian Liberation Organization.  Dressed as an Afghan man, she covered, for Time magazine, the Soviet invasion of Afghanistan in 1980; the first woman smuggled into the country by the Mujahadeen.  In southern Mexico, the Zapatista uprising in 1994 became part of a project she had undertaken to document obscure indian tribes near the Guatemalan border. Of her portraits and nudes, it has been remarked that “Lambray reveals a timeless sensibility that echoes the exotic locales in which she has shot her more daring journalistic photographs.”  The critic, Julia Scully, in comparing Lambray to several other photographers, wrote “(her) efforts are ultimately more effective as documents, because she interferes least in the relationship between viewer and subject.”

 

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