Marie Cosindas, photographer (34)

I have started a new book of essays by Teju Cole, whom I love love love. The first chapter is about Caravaggio, and it's wonderful. But I don't want to post little JPGs of Caravaggio paintings, which in real life are monumental in size, and deep—deep in the use of paint, in emotion, and in subject matter: the beheading of Saint John the Baptist, the martyrdom of Saint Ursula, the denial of Saint Peter. 

But as I was flipping through the pages of the book to see what I might expect as I continue to read, I came across an image from 1976, Memories II. 

In Cole's book, it's in b&w. The color reproduction of the dye transfer print is so much better. What a tapestry! 

Who is this artist? A little googling filled me in. 

Her name is Marie Cosindas, and according to the New York Times obituary of 2017 (she died at age 93), she "artfully composed still lifes and portraits, made with Polaroid film, broke with the dominant black-and-white aesthetic of the early 1960s and opened up a new world of color." A painter by training, she started studying photography with Paul Caponigro and Edward Steichen around 1960. In 1961 she took a workshop with Ansel Adams, who told her, "You're shooting in black and white, but you think in color." He recommended her to Polaroid, who approached her to test a new product, Polacolor.  

She did still-lifes and portraits mainly, it seems. As the obituary put it, "The colors were ripe and opulent, the stagings theatrical, the references painterly, recalling artists like Vermeer, Rembrandt, Caravaggio or, in many portraits, Sargent."

Here are some of her images. They really are like paintings.

Ellen, Boston, 1965

Louise Nevelson, 1970

Andy Warhol, 1966

Sailors, Key West, 1966

Yves Saint-Laurent, 1968

“I want to evoke the mystery of color itself,” she told the Christian Science Monitor in 1979. “I photograph late in the day, the time Rembrandt favored for painting, so that the subtlest hues surface. They are as complex as any person, perhaps more so. It’s that lyricism, that mystery of color itself—that’s my signature.”

Now I'm looking forward to page 83 of Cole's book, and "An Incantation for Marie Cosindas."