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Marian Wood Kolisch (1920-2008) lived most of her life in Portland, Oregon. Her paternal grandfather was Charles Erskine Scott Wood (1852-1944), a soldier, lawyer, poet, painter, and local celebrity who was central to Portland's cultural life in the late 19th and early 20th centuries. As a young woman Marian Kolisch took an interest in acting. However, financial considerations led her to attend the Katherine Gibbs secretarial school in Boston, and she worked for a time in a law firm after returning to Portland. At the same time she pursued acting on an amateur basis, appearing in productions at the Portland Civic Theatre. In 1943 she married lawyer J. Pierre Kolisch, and the couple lived at first in upstate New York, where they had two daughters, Christine and Leslie. In 1952 the family moved to Portland, Oregon, where Pierre opened his own law firm and the couple had a third child, Pierre, Jr. Although Marian now focused her energies on raising her children, she continued to take an active interest in the arts.

In 1972 Marian Kolisch began a career in photography. She had been a creative individual her entire life but did not find her professional niche until age fifty-two. She studied with prominent photographers, including Ansel Adams and Arnold Newman. Although she experimented with many photographic genres -- including landscape, street photography, and still life -- like Newman, her specialty was environmental portraiture where the subject is photographed in his or her own environment. Using environmental portraiture and recorded interviews Kolisch produced her best known body of work: documentation of Oregon’s creative class. Included in this undertaking were Pietro Belluschi, Thomas Vaughan, John Yeon, Arlene Schnitzer, and LaVerne Krause. Later, she photographed the next generation of creative Oregonians, capturing the likenesses of Gus Van Sant, Henk Pander, and Jamey Hampton, among others. She photographed her last subject, Senator Mark Hatfield, in 2003.