Marie Cosindas

Marie Cosindas (born 1925 in Boston, Massachusetts) is an American photographer. She is best known for her evocative still life and color portraits.

Biography

After initially studying painting at the Boston Museum School, she worked as a designer from 1944 to 1960. During this period she began to integrate with, and eventually became part of the stable of photographers that belonged to the Carl Siembab Gallery, with whom she shared a building in Boston.

It was during a trip to her family's homeland, Greece, that Cosindas began to use photography as her primary medium. Using a 2 1/4 square Rollieflex, Cosindas took snapshots of the Grecian landscape, which she intended to later translate into paintings. However, she was so taken with the photographic results she gave up painting.

Cosindas attended photography workshops with Ansel Adams in 1961. While studying with Ansel Adams, she worked almost exclusively in the medium of black-and-white photography, making several series of still lifes and architectural photographs.

In 1962, Cosindas was one of about a dozen photographers who were invited by Dr. Edwin Land and the Polaroid Corporation to test their new instant-developing color film. From this time she began to work exclusively in color, manipulating various components of the process to produce the warm tones she preferred. Cosindas found that using Polaroid freed her from all the technicalities involved in making color prints, and she was able to concentrate just on her images. Using only available light and often having only a few minutes in which to photograph her subjects, Cosindas produced a remarkably distinct portfolio of portraits of well-known figures.

Along with Paul Caponigro, William Clift, Walter Chappell and Carl Chiarenza, Cosindas co-founded the group Association of Heliographers, New York. A New York photographers' cooperative that included some of the most influential American art photographers of the 1960s. The Heliographers' first public exhibition took place on 1 July 1963. The show promoted "‘camera vision’ as a way of seeing and recording the world meaningfully rather than mechanically".^[1]

Using a view camera, natural light and color filters, Cosindas's work played a vital role in establishing the use of color in fine art photography during the 1960s and her solo show at the Museum of Modern Art in New York in 1966 was one of the institution's first to feature color photography. Subjects of her portraits work include Andy Warhol, Truman Capote, Faye Dunaway, Robert Redford, Paul Newman, Ezra Pound and Tom Wolfe, among others.

Cosindas has lectured as a part of the Photographic Resource Center at Boston University.^[2]

Bibliography

• Marie Cosindas: Color Photographs (1978) Published by New York Graphic Society (Boston) (with an essay by Tom Wolfe ; [edited by Susan Feldman])

References