COSINDAS’ COLORFUL PALETTE

“In the ‘60s, nobody made photographs that looked like paintings,” said Marie Cosindas to a gaggle of photographers and art watchers who recently gathered at the Santa Barbara Museum of Art.

Despite her inclination to shoot against the aesthetic grain--or perhaps because of it--she was given a show at the Museum of Modern Art in 1966 by curator John Szarkowski. Since then, Cosindas’ painterly photographs have become an increasingly visible component of the contemporary photography scene. Her current retrospective of color Polaroid work (and a few early black-and-white images) continues at the museum through Dec. 31.

Cosindas has been a prominent force in reversing a 50-year-old antipathy to photography that emulates painting, which began when Group f/64 renounced soft-focus Pictorialism. Though she speaks of an affinity to Rembrandt and Vermeer, it’s a 19th-Century love of opulence that seems to form her work. With an obvious love of the lavish and the intimate, Cosindas painstakingly sets up richly patterned still lifes. She arranges old dolls, patterned fabrics, baubles and flowers in little windows of elegance that look like effusive period pieces.

Commissioned by Ladies Home Journal in 1967 to photograph asparagus, the Boston-based artist had to order a quantity of the vegetable from Hawaii and figure out how to keep it fresh through six days of “sittings.” The result was a series of still lifes that raise the lowly green stalks to the level of honored guests. Tied in ribbons and nestled in luxury, plump bunches of asparagus lounge on gold satin, recline among plump grapes, stand in millefiore bowls and keep company with a tiny portrait of an old-fashioned girl.

Cosindas’ portraits of celebrities are staged with an equal degree of care, though settings may be relatively plain. Paul Newman and Robert Redford, photographed in tuxedos off stage of “The Sting” in 1973, are formally arranged so that their starched shirt fronts, hands and faces emerge from a shadowy background. Andy Warhol, ominously framed by a doorway, looks wretched and strange. Relatively straight portraits of photographer Imogen Cunningham and sculptor Louise Nevelson focus attention on the aging faces of distinguished women.

An aficionado of props, Cosindas buys, borrows, assembles and rearranges for days on end until she has exactly the desired effect. With the exception of her “Kimono Series,” which places a kimono-clad model among gorgeously patterned fabrics systematically collected for the purpose, she says that she works quite intuitively.

In an effort to exercise complete control over her art, she mixes natural and incandescent light, uses warming and cooling filters and often overdevelops film. Asked by Polaroid in 1962 to experiment with the company’s new Polacolor film, she was a rule-breaker from the start, but she says she is “not into equipment.” One camera and three lenses keep her satisfied.

The eighth of 10 children born to Greek immigrants, Cosindas studied fashion design and fine arts in Boston. She originally worked as a painter, but now says she “didn’t really want to paint” and that she “struggled with being an artist” during her early years. Her avoidance of painting took such elaborate tacks as having “a beautiful easel” built which was then too nice to use. Now it comes in quite handy in her studio where she turns out painterly images on film.