Marcia Resnick born on November 21, 1950 in Brooklyn, New York, a great photographer and chronicler of the downtown scene in the 1970s and beyond, died after a battle with cancer on June 18, 2025.
Phyllis Stein shared “I’m shocked and saddened to learn Marcia has passed. Thanks to her for all her wonderful photos she so generously shared with all of us. Her star will shine brightly for eternity.” Taryn Resnick wrote “My first cousin Marcia Resnick left this earth yesterday. I am so terribly sad. I am grateful I got to know her these last few years on our family zoom calls, which she was an avid participant of. My heart hurts today.”
From an early age, Marcia’s artistic instincts were apparent—her first drawing was exhibited at the Brooklyn Children’s Museum when she was just five, and her first photograph was taken in third grade. These formative experiences marked the beginning of a lifelong journey into the world of fine art and photography.
Resnick studied fine art photography at New York University, Cooper Union, and later at California Institute of the Arts, where she was mentored by conceptual art legends John Baldessari and Allan Kaprow. It was in the early 1970s that she embraced photography as her primary form of expression, just as it was beginning to be recognized as a fine art medium.
In 1975, Marcia returned to New York City and published three conceptual artist books—Landscape, See, and Tahitian Eve. Her breakthrough work, Re-visions (1978), was a compilation of humorous, staged images reflecting on female adolescence, each paired with insightful text. It became a feminist and artistic milestone, blending photography, memory, and narrative in groundbreaking ways.
Living in the heart of New York’s vibrant cultural underground, Marcia documented a period of immense creative energy. By day, she taught photography at Queens College and NYU, and by night, she immersed herself in the clubs—CBGB’s, Max’s Kansas City, and The Mudd Club—photographing icons of the punk, art, and literary worlds. Her portraits often captured the raw and intimate sides of figures like Johnny Thunders, John Lydon, Andy Warhol, John Belushi, William Burroughs, and Mick Jagger.
Her photographs are held in prestigious collections including the Museum of Modern Art (NYC), Metropolitan Museum of Art, Jewish Museum, Rijksmuseum, Getty Museum, and more.
In 2015, her photographic legacy was further cemented with the release of “Punks, Poets and Provocateurs: New York City Bad Boys 1977–1982,” a book co-written with Victor Bockris, featuring contributions from John Waters, Richard Hell, Gary Indiana, and others.