Marcia Resnick, a photographer known for documenting Manhattan’s downtown art scene during the late 1970s and early 1980s, died at age 74. Her cause of death was lung cancer, according to her sister Janice Hahn, her sole surviving relative.
Resnick started out making conceptual photography and later moving toward portraiture. The shift came as she became increasingly entwined with a faction of ascendant artists and musicians who frequented New York nightclubs like Mudd Club and CBGB. That included a subset people associated with the era’s punk movement.
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Born in Brooklyn in 1950 to a mother and father working in publishing and art, Resnick spent her undergraduate years at New York University and Cooper Union, later pursing photography at California Institute of the Arts. She would go on to teach at both her New York alma maters.
Some of her most famous subjects were male musicians, some widely known in the mainstream and others more niche. She shot Mick Jagger and Klaus Nomi; the latter passed away in 1983, making him one of the first notable figures of the downtown scene to die of AIDS-related complications.
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 photographs, as did Ed Koch and comedian John Belushi, who posed for her in 1982 during a spontaneous visit to her Canal Street studio. Her picture of him is thought to be the last photograph of him before his death of an overdose.
In interviews, Resnick said she wanted to reconsider gender norms using her photography. Her pictures of famous men defied convention, often catching her subjects in intimate moments that went against the buttoned-up aesthetic associated with male celebrities. Pictures such as these can be found her series “Punks, Poets & Provocateurs: New York City Bad Boys, 1977–1982.”
Some of Resnick’s photographs were published by the SoHo Weekly News, where she was a columnist. But though her work received a good deal of public attention, privately she struggled: Resnick battled an addiction to alcohol, and then eventually to heroin, for over two decades.
She is today considered one of the foremost documentarians of the ’80s punk scene. In 2022, a retrospective of her photography opened at the Bowdoin College Museum of Art in Maine before traveling to two other institutions.
