Marie Cosindas, a Greek-American Pioneer of Photography

When Boston-born artist Marie Cosindas fell in love with the Grecian landscape on her first trip to the parental homeland as a teenager, she realised that the camera was the only way to capture its true beauty, eventually spawning a remarkable career during the 1960s and 70s in which she was considered a pioneer of colour photography, perhaps best known for her evocative still life and color-saturated portraits. Although her work gradually fell out of fashion, her career is enjoying something of a second wind with two recent solo exhibitions.

Born in 1925 as one of 10 children to a Greek-American family, Cosindas studied painting in Boston and worked as a designer in the 1950s, but in 1961 she attended a photography workshop with Ansel Adams. Back then she was working almost exclusively with black and white photos. In 1962 she was invited by Polaroid to experiment with the company’s new instant-developing color film, and within a month of experimentation had created her own style without use of a darkroom. 

By 1966, despite an aversion to lending out her work for display that would ultimately hamper her career, Cosindas was exhibiting colour photographs at the Museum of Modern Art in New York, only the fifth woman to have a solo exhibition there. It was a crucial point in her career whereafter her work played a vital role in establishing the use of color in fine art photography during the 1960s. 

She photographed almost every important personality of the day, including Andy Warhol, Coco Chanel, Robert Redford, Truman Capote and Yves Saint Laurent. Many critics likened her work to that of Caravaggio and Gustav Klimt, but now she is living quietly in Boston. “I didn’t go out of fashion, but I was out of the public eye,” she said in a recent interview.

That seems to be changing, however, after solo exhibitions last year at the Bruce Silverstein Gallery in New York and in Texas at the Amon Carter Museum of American Art, and a recent article on the Greek-American’s pioneering work and legacy in UK newspaper the Daily Telegraph.