Marie Cosindas was barely four-foot-eleven up on her tiptoes, if that. She may have weighed 100 pounds as long as she was lugging her big old Linhof wooden-box portrait camera and her tripod and stacks of four-by-five-inch film slides around in her duffel bag. She was so soft-spoken that if you were eating a potato chip or even a Stoned Wheat Thin, you couldn’t make out a word she said. And inside all that delicate wrapping was an iron rod.
She had started out as a painter in the Late Impressionist style … with next-to-no success. When she was 36 years old, she decided to switch to photography and was determined to learn it from the best there was. She applied to the famous photographer Ansel Adams’s Creative Photography Workshop in Yosemite, California, and he turned her down. She took that the Marie Cosindas way. She rang Adams up on the telephone and demanded, in her little ladylike voice, that he admit her. When he declined, she ladyliked him with incessant phone calls and letters from Boston until he caved in and became her mentor in his studio on the other side of the country. Thanks to Ansel Adams’s pull, she became one of 12 photographers chosen by Dr. Edwin Land to experiment with his new invention, Polaroid color photography. She was the one who turned it into an artistic medium unlike any other. When she died last month, at the age of 93, she was one of America’s leading art photographers — or was it leading classical painters? You could choose either one, or both, and not be wrong.
