Marcia Resnick, a photographer known for her stylized portraits of musicians, artists, and underground figures in 1970s and early ’80s Manhattan, died on June 19th in New York. She was 74. Her sister told The Washington Post that the cause of death was lung cancer.
A keen documenter of New York’s downtown demimonde, Resnick created some of the last studio photographs of actor John Belushi before his fatal overdose in 1982. Her muses also included now-legendary figures such as Joey Ramone, Mick Jagger, and Debbie Harry. She brought a conceptual art background and ironic lens to the punk-inflected nightlife at the Mudd Club, Max’s Kansas City, and CBGB.
Born in 1950 in Brooklyn, Resnick was embedded into the city’s cultural scene from an early age. Her mother, Sonia Resnick, was a painter and publishing executive; her father, Herbert Resnick, ran a letterpress printing business. After attending New York University and Cooper Union, she earned an MFA at CalArts in 1973, and promptly returned to New York, where she taught photography at Queens College and Cooper Union.
Resnick’s early works mainly focused on landscapes that she’d alter with paint. That led to the 1978 publication of “Re-visions,” an autobiographical photo-text project in which she staged scenes of adolescent girlhood with a teenage model as her stand-in. Using props and captions, Resnick explored themes of self-image, performance, and rebellion.
A regular at the nightlife clubs in Manhattan, she became acquainted with a large cross-section of the city’s artistic and cultural vanguard. Her portrait subjects ranged from Blondie guitarist Chris Stein and rock legend Iggy Pop to writer William Burroughs and artist Jean-Michel Basquiat. She even photographed a very young Anthony Bourdain in the early 1980s.
In 2015, she published Punks, Poets & Provocateurs: New York City’s Bad Boys, 1977–1982, featuring more than 100 portraits of the era. Belushi appears in a series of images she took after an all-night party, donning a ski mask and leather jacket. Other portraits from the period show a grinning Mayor Ed Koch and Studio 54 owner Steven Rubell on the shoulder of legendary lawyer Roy Cohn.
The Bowdoin College Museum of Art mounted a retrospective for Resnick in 2022, titled “As It Is or Could Be.” Her work is featured in the collections of the Museum of Modern Art in New York, the Metropolitan Museum of Art, and the San Francisco Museum of Modern Art.
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