A Passion for Make up and Photography
Hello, I am Irina Tübbecke, a German make-up artist and photographer, born and raised in Berlin. From 1993 to 2005 I lived in Cologne before I was drawn back to Berlin in 2005.
It all started with my mother’s hair curlers. I spent my time coiling her hair in them, or my own, and then my friends’. My first lipstick was orange, a fasionable colour back in the seventies. Not only that, it also went well with the hairpieces I occasionally borrowed from my mum. They didn’t match the colour of my own hair in the least, but for a brief moment they gave me that gorgeous feeling of having long hair.
Around the same time I had my first encounter with a camera. A strange, angular shaped cardboard box, an Agfa Box, that belonged to my grandmother. With my mum’s Zeiss Ikon Contina I took my first pictures. She explained exposure time and f-stops to me – still helpful advice if, as I do, you like using an analogue camera. My first travel camera was an Agfa Pocket Camera, a popular companion back then.
When I turned sixteen I started a hairdresser apprenticeship with a well-known Berlin hairstylist. Jason’s Hairpower was the absolutely hippest hair salon in West Berlin in the 1980s. I captured our crazy hairdos of that period on film with my Leica mini zoom. By the time I’d completed my three-year training I already had jobs in two other salons, but I knew there had to be more to life than that. That was just the beginning!
In 1988 I wound up in London at Greasepaint School where for a year I learned everything and anything to do with make-up. Just one year later, in 1990, I got my first offer – to work for three weeks as an additional make-up artist in a major American film production, and with a fully-fledged Hollywood cast to boot. Despite my initial trepidation one thing was certain – this was the life for me!
In 1992 I joined the world tour of the theatre production “Doctor Faustus lights the Lights” by Robert Wilson. I was given free hand to supervise and carry out the make-up designs by Cornelia Wentzel, and in the end they even put me in charge of overall costume supervision.
Over the following years I became familiar with various film genres, and as the films changed, so did my cameras. But it wasn’t until my return to Berlin in 2005 that I decided to put my second passion on a stronger footing. For one year I studied photography at “Fotografie am Schiffbauerdamm”, now called the Neue Schule für Fotografie. Then, in 2007, I switched to the Berlin “Ostkreuzschule für Fotografie” and took seminars led by Michael Trippel, Rudi Meisel, joining Arno Fischer’s master class in 2011. I took Workshop classes in Berlin, NYC and Italy. In 2017 i decided to go back to Ostkreuzschule to join another year into the class of Ludwig Rauch. On my webpage www.irinadabo.com i share my work to the public.
Today I enjoy the great privilege of being able to combine both passions in one and the same place – on the film set. Nowhere else can people be portrayed so remarkably in all their depth, strength and fragility.
Between 2010 and 2017 I became a member of the German Movie Academy.
Please feel free to read and download my crew united online filmography or IMDB Profil to contact me directly if you are interested in collaborating with me.