Biography
Fred J. Koenekamp was an American cinematographer who worked in film and television from the 1960s to the 1990s. The son of cinematographer Hans F. Koenekamp, he began his career in 1947 as a film loader at RKO and later spent more than a decade at MGM, where he served as director of photography on the series The Man from U.N.C.L.E. (1964–67), for which he received Emmy recognition.
Koenekamp received an Academy Award for Best Cinematography for The Towering Inferno (1974, shared with Joseph Biroc). He earned further Oscar nominations for Patton (1970) and Islands in the Stream (1977). He collaborated frequently with director Franklin J. Schaffner on films including Patton, Papillon (1973) and Islands in the Stream. Other credits include The Amityville Horror (1979), The Champ (1979) and The Adventures of Buckaroo Banzai Across the 8th Dimension (1984). In 2005 he received the American Society of Cinematographers Lifetime Achievement Award.
