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Remembering Marcia Resnick
25 June 2025
Marcia Resnick died on Wednesday in Manhattan at a hospice facility where she was suffering from lung cancer. She was 74.
Born in Brooklyn, her mother was a publishing executive and a painter, and her father ran a letterpress printing business.
"I first exhibited my art, a drawing of a blond Asian lady standing on a stage, at the Brooklyn Children’s Museum when I was five years old," she writes on her bio page. "In the third grade, I took my first photograph entitled Miss Wolf and the Seals at the Aquarium. These two events foretold the course of my life."
She studied art at New York University before transferring to the Cooper Union, from which she graduated in 1972. She earned a master's in fine arts from the California Institute of the Arts in 1973 before returning to New York City where she taught at Queens College, the Cooper Union and N.Y.U.
In 1975, she self-published three conceptual artist books: Landscape, See and Tahitian Eve. In 1976, she began work on a series of photographic reconstructions of memories of her early life. "This compilation of humorous images about female adolescence, each complemented with a short text, was published as Re-visions," she notes.
She found the late 1970s inspiring. "Rock musicians and artists alike were graduating from art schools. Painters were making films. Writers were doing performance art. Sculptors were doing installations. Artists were acting in films, making music and collaborating with each other," she described it.
She would go out every night clubbing. Feeling guilty about it, she brought her camera along to candids backstage or in the dressing rooms before inviting her subjects to her studio on Canal Street "where atmosphere could be generated, lighting could be manipulated and props could be employed."
Among her subjects were Debbie Harry, Chris Stein, Roy Cohn, Steve Rubell, Klaus Nomi, Ed Koch, Joey Ramone, Mick Jagger, William Burroughs, Andy Warhol, Iggy Pop, Allen Ginsberg, among others.
Perhaps her most notable subject was John Belushi, whose portrait she captured in 60 shots six months before he overdosed in Los Angeles.
In 2016, the exhibition Marcia Resnick, Conception: Vintage Photographs 1974-1976 was shown at Deborah Bell Photographs gallery. In 2023, the Eastmas Museum exhibited Marcia Resnick: As It Is or Could Be, remarking:
Marcia Resnick was one of the most ambitious and innovative American photographers of the 1970s. Combining social critique with poignant, often humorous performance, her photographs explore -- in a conceptual vernacular -- aesthetic, social and political issues at once timely and timeless. A part of the now-mythic creative community in Downtown New York, she created work that challenged traditional ideas about what a photograph could be.
Her book Punks, Poets & Provocateurs: New York City Bad Boys, 1977-1982 was published in 2015.