Marcia Resnick is a photographer known for recording downtown art scenes in Manhattan, at the age of 74 in the late 1970s and early 1980s. Her sister Janice Hahn said her death was lung cancer.
Resnick started to make concept photography and then went to portraiture. As she increasingly gets entangled with a faction of rising artists and musicians, they often attend New York nightclubs like Mudd Club and CBGB. These include subsets of people related to the punk movement of the era.
Born in Brooklyn in 1950, Resnick was a father of publishing and art, spending his undergraduate degree at New York University and the Cooper Union, and later engaged in photography at the California Arts of The Arts of Arts. She will continue to teach at her two New York Alma Maters.
Some of her most famous themes are male musicians, some are well known in the mainstream, while others are better known. She shot and killed Mick Jagger and Klaus Nomi, who died in 1983, making him one of the earliest figures of death from AIDS-related complications on the downtown site.
Resnick briefly married Wayne Kramer, guitarist of Detroit punk band MC5.
Artists Joseph Beuys and Jean-Michel Basquiat appear in photos of Resnick, with Ed Koch and comedian John Belushi also appearing in 1982 when they spontaneously visited their Canal Street studio. Her photograph of him was considered the last one before his death.
Resnick said in an interview that she wanted to rethink gender norms with photography. Photos of her famous man against the convention, often grabbing her subjects in close moments, a button aesthetic associated with male celebrities. Pictures like “Punk, Poet and Provoker: The Bad Boy in New York City, 1977-1982”.
Some photos of Resnick by SOHO Weekly Newsshe is a columnist. But despite her work receiving widespread attention, she struggled privately: Resnick fought against alcohol addiction and then eventually fought heroin for twenty years.
Today, she is considered one of the most important documentaries on the punk stage in the 1980s. In 2022, a retrospective of her photography opens at the Bowden College Museum of Art in Maine before heading to two other institutions.
