KISMARIC, Carole 1942-2002

OBITUARY NOTICE—See index for CA sketch: Born April 28, 1942, in Orange, NJ; died of pancreatic cancer November 19, 2002, in New York, NY. Editor and author. Kismaric was an innovative editor of photography books and magazines and a curator of photography exhibitions. Although she studied psychology at Pennsylvania State University, where she earned her bachelor's degree in 1964, she decided to go into journalism after college. After working a few years as a reporter for United Press International and Reporter in Columbus, Ohio, and as a writer for magazine publisher Conde Nast, she joined the staff of Time-Life in 1969 as a picture researcher. She became an associate editor in 1973 and working on Time-Life's photography series. When she moved to Aperture in 1976, the publisher was still creating photography books in the old style in which one photo was displayed per page with no accompanying captions and surrounded by a frame, as if it were in a museum. Kismaric developed a more loosely structured, magazine-like format for the books she edited. She also edited Aperture, the publisher's quarterly magazine, until she left the company in 1985. In addition to her work as an editor, Kismaric was involved in a number of photography exhibitions in which her creative flair was also evident. In one exhibition, for example, photographs were accompanied by recording of people talking about how the photos had influenced them. She was especially active with exhibitions in the 1990s, and was co-curator of such traveling shows as "Forced out in Time," "Talking Pictures," and "Fame after Photography". In 1990 Kismaric founded, with Marvin Heiferman, the companies Lookout and Lookout Books, which produced photography books and exhibitions. In addition to the books she worked on for Time-Life and Aperture, Kismaric wrote and edited such works as The Photography Catalogue (1976) and the photography books Forced Out: Refugees on the Move (1988) and Forced Out: The Agony of the Refugee in Our Time (1989). As the wife of the late children's author and illustrator Charles Mikolaycak, Kismaric was also the coauthor of a number of books for children, including The Boy Who Tried to Cheat Death (1971), Cinderella (1993), and The Mysterious Case of Nancy Drew and the Hardy Boys (1998). More recently, she was the author of The Art of the X-Files (1998) and Big Dogs, Little Dogs (1998).

OBITUARIES AND OTHER SOURCES:

books

Who's Who in America, 56th edition, Marquis (New Providence, NJ), 2001.

periodicals

Los Angeles Times, November 24, 2002, p. B16.

New York Times, November 20, 2002, p. A21.