MARCIA RESNICK

Marcia Resnick is a New York City photographer and educator. She is an alumnus of the Cooper Union and California Institute of the Arts. Her images have been shown internationally in galleries and appear in many major museum collections. Her photographs are exhibited internationally and are in major museum collections including the Museum of Modern Art, NYC, Metropolitan Museum of Art, NYC, National Portrait Gallery, Washington DC, George Eastman House, Rochester, Museum of Fine Arts, Houston, New York Public Library, Jewish Museum, NYC, Rijksmuseum, Amsterdam and Getty Museum, Los Angeles. Her work has been published in numerous counterculture periodicals, from The Paris Review to Rolling Stone Magazine, self-published artist’s books and an autobiography in photographs, Re-Visions. Her confrontational images explore aggression, fame and sexuality while echoing the primordial audacity of punk music and punk style.

In Her Words
”After studying art at NYU and Cooper Union, I went to graduate school at California Institute of the Arts, where I studied conceptual art with John Baldessari and Allen Kaprow. It was the early 1970s when I began to study photography, which was finally becoming accepted as a fine art. I was discovering the world through my camera. It was in this milieu that I taught photography at Queens College and NYU by day and went out every night to hear music at CBGB’s, Max’s and the Mudd Club, which was also a venue for various artistic events, film showings, readings and theme parties. Guilty at spending so much time in clubs, I convinced myself that my photographic forays into the night, were my art. After taking candid pictures backstage or in dressing rooms at clubs, I would often invite people to my studio for photo sessions where atmosphere could be generated, lighting could be manipulated and props could be employed. My work with the Soho Weekly News, New York Magazine and other periodicals gave me access to photograph people who were well known in the popular culture. After Re-Visions, I decided to explore parts unknown. I traveled to Egypt alone and became the virtual prisoner of a deranged Arab soldier. Good out of bad, this abrupt exposure to ungovernable maleness led me to my next great subject: Bad Boys. I felt compelled to record the emotional geography of the human face so I submerged myself in portraiture. The fact that I was a woman photographing men was crucial to the dynamic of my project. Combining confrontation with collaboration, I explored fame, sexuality and individual style. While photographing Johnny Thunders, John Lydon and other leading figures in the punk music scene, my focus broadened to include portraits from all the arts, including cultural icons Andy Warhol, William Burroughs, John Belushi and Mick Jagger.”