Marcia Resnick, a photographer recognized for documenting Manhattan’s downtown artwork scene in the course of the late Nineteen Seventies and early Nineteen Eighties, died at age 74. Her reason for demise was lung most cancers, in line with her sister Janice Hahn, her sole surviving relative.
Resnick began out making conceptual pictures and later transferring towards portraiture. The shift got here as she turned more and more entwined with a faction of ascendant artists and musicians who frequented New York nightclubs like Mudd Membership and CBGB. That included a subset folks related to the period’s punk motion.
Born in Brooklyn in 1950 to a mom and father working in publishing and artwork, Resnick spent her undergraduate years at New York College and Cooper Union, later pursing pictures at California Institute of the Arts. She would go on to show at each her New York alma maters.
A few of her most well-known topics have been male musicians, some broadly recognized within the mainstream and others extra area of interest. She shot Mick Jagger and Klaus Nomi; the latter handed away in 1983, making him one of many first notable figures of the downtown scene to die of AIDS-related problems.
Resnick was briefly married to Wayne Kramer, a guitarist for the Detroit-based punk band MC5.
Artists Joseph Beuys and Jean-Michel Basquiat appeared in Resnick’s images, as did Ed Koch and comic John Belushi, who posed for her in 1982 throughout a spontaneous go to to her Canal Road studio. Her image of him is regarded as the final {photograph} of him earlier than his demise of an overdose.
In interviews, Resnick stated she wished to rethink gender norms utilizing her pictures. Her photos of well-known males defied conference, usually catching her topics in intimate moments that went in opposition to the buttoned-up aesthetic related to male celebrities. Footage equivalent to these may be discovered her sequence “Punks, Poets & Provocateurs: New York Metropolis Unhealthy Boys, 1977–1982.”
A few of Resnick’s images have been printed by the SoHo Weekly Information, the place she was a columnist. However although her work obtained a great deal of public consideration, privately she struggled: Resnick battled an dependancy to alcohol, after which finally to heroin, for over 20 years.
She is at present thought-about one of many foremost documentarians of the ’80s punk scene. In 2022, a retrospective of her pictures opened on the Bowdoin School Museum of Artwork in Maine earlier than touring to 2 different establishments.
