Marie Cosindas is an American photographer. She is best known for her evocative still life and colour 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 small 35mm Rolliflex, 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 never again picked up a paintbrush.

Cosindas attended photography workshops with Ansel Adams

Ansel Adams

Ansel Easton Adams was an American photographer and environmentalist, best known for his black-and-white photographs of the American West, especially in Yosemite National Park....

 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.

The major turning point in her career happened in 1962 she was one of about a dozen photographers who were invited by Dr. Edwin Land and the Polaroid Corporation

Polaroid Corporation

Polaroid Corporation is an American-based international consumer electronics and eyewear company, originally founded in 1937 by Edwin H. Land. It is most famous for its instant film cameras, which reached the market in 1948, and continued to be the company's flagship product line until the February...

 to test their new instant-developing color film. From this time that 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 with 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".

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

Andy Warhol

Andrew Warhola , known as Andy Warhol, was an American painter, printmaker, and filmmaker who was a leading figure in the visual art movement known as pop art...

, Truman Capote

Truman Capote

Truman Streckfus Persons , known as Truman Capote , was an American author, many of whose short stories, novels, plays, and nonfiction are recognized literary classics, including the novella Breakfast at Tiffany's and the true crime novel In Cold Blood , which he labeled a "nonfiction novel." At...

, Faye Dunaway

Faye Dunaway

Faye Dunaway is an American actress.Dunaway won an Academy Award for Best Actress for her performance in Network after receiving previous nominations for the critically acclaimed films Bonnie and Clyde and Chinatown...

, Robert Redford, Paul Newman, Ezra Pound

Ezra Pound

Ezra Weston Loomis Pound was an American expatriate poet and critic and a major figure in the early modernist movement in poetry...

and Tom Wolfe, among others.

Cosindas has lectured as a part of the Photographic Resource Center at Boston University.