Marie Cosindas, Memories II, 1976
Marie Cosindas, who was born in Boston in September 1923 and who died in the same city in May of this year at age 93, made photographs of such potency that they seem magical, dependent on something beyond mere sleight of hand for their mesmerizing effects and unified mood, so that the experience of looking at a selection of them is like watching a single sentence unfurl over several pages, driven along by an invisible inner consistency, not unlike the atmosphere of imaginative abundance that Gabriel García Márquez evoked in his novel “One Hundred Years of Solitude,” an atmosphere he used as the backdrop for the dense saga of the Buendía family in the mythical town of Macondo, and especially in his account of the magician Melquíades, a “heavy Gypsy with an untamed beard and sparrow hands,” a bearer of dazzling and arcane knowledge, including visions of the present and the future, as well as the secrets of optics, telescopes and magnetism, so that many different kinds of insight seem to find a natural unity inside him, and whose work re-emerges in the final pages of the novel in Sanskrit parchments, with “the even lines in the private cipher of the Emperor Augustus and the odd ones in a Lacedaemonian military code,” the inscrutabilities layered on one another to arrive at a startling lucidity of the kind that might be experienced by someone whose tangled dreams, regardless of their wildness or relentlessness, give way to a pure vision of wakefulness, though not the uninflected wakefulness of one who rises in early morning to a hot and innocent white light but rather the shadowed knowingness of one who has slept all day and awakes to the infinitesimally graded colors of a deepening evening, a moodiness recognizable to any viewer of Cosindas’s photographs, which make the most of small, dark spaces, a talent that perhaps originated in her being the eighth of 10 children raised by Greek immigrant parents in a small apartment in Boston’s South End...
