HER PICTURES TELL A TIGHTLY CHOREOGRAPHED STORY

Photographer Marcia Resnick earned recognition as one of the most innovative American photographers as part of the mythic downtown NYC art scene of the 1970s and 1980s with her portraits of major cultural figures such as Basquiat, Mick Jagger and John Belushi. For the visual artist, a photograph is not static—”it’s an exchange, a performance, a selectively rendered reality”. She challenged traditional ideas about what a photograph could be. Her work has been exhibited internationally and are in major museum collections including the Museum of Modern Art, Metropolitan Museum of Art, National Portrait Gallery, Washington DC, George Eastman House, Rochester and the Museum of Fine Arts, in Houston.

Born in Brooklyn in 1950, Resnick began her undergraduate studies at New York University, where she took her first photographs, documenting people and current events such as antiwar demonstrations. In 1969, she transferred to Cooper Union, where she began experimenting with photographic materials and first encountered Allan Kaprow’s Happenings. Intrigued by Kaprow’s desire to challenge the traditionally distinct realms of art while blurring life with his artistic practice, she pursued graduate study with him at the California Institute of the Arts (CalArts), where she also encountered and studied with John Baldessari and Robert Fichter. It was while at CalArts that Resnick began pushing the boundaries of traditional photography, applying oil paint to her images and toying with the scale of her photographs, at times expanding them to billboard-size. A number of works from Resnick’s student years, including a painted photograph of her parents - From The Eye of Photography Following a number of personal and societal shifts – including the demise of Soho Weekly News, a difficult divorce, and the drastic changes in the cultural scene of downtown New York – Resnick focused her energies on teaching. Though she stopped actively producing photographs in the early 1980s, Resnick’s work endures as far more than a record of the 1970s cultural scene in New York: it is a testament to the innovation and creativity that stems from eschewing tradition and pushing boundaries.

Cover photo credit. SHE IMAGINED HERSELF A STARLET, 1976–77, GELATIN SILVER PRINT INSCRIBED WITH GRAPHITE, COURTESY OF THE ESTATE OF SUSAN KOESTLER.