Punks, Poets & Politicians

Gallery Statement Photography has a unique ability to capture the essence of a time; perhaps more so than any other medium; and Marcia Resnick’s photographs do exactly that. In a time when the spirit of New York City was woven into a tapestry of collective consciousness that included such diverse souls as Andy Worhol, Johnny Thunders, John Belushi, Iggy Pop and William Borroughs, Marcia Resnick was there with her camera, piecing it all together into what now amounts to an amazing body of work entitled “Punks, Poets & Politicians”. Well known in these circles herself, she was trusted to capture the faces of the major players of NYC arts and politics. As you can imagine, there is a rich story in every one of these photographs and an even grander story which encompasses them all. Please come and relive the tale with the artist, here at McKay Imaging Gallery on September 25th. This show runs until November 12, 2009. Artist’s Statement Marcia Resnick is a New York City photographer and educator. Her images have been shown internationally in galleries and are in major museum collections. Her work has been published in numerous counterculture books and periodicals, from the Paris Review to Rolling Stone Magazine, as well as in her self-published artist books and her photo-auto-biography, Re-visions. Her forthcoming book, Bad Boys: A Compendium of Punks, Poets and Powerful People, examines power, fame and sexuality in addition to the ironic gamut of meanings for the word bad, from evil to naughty to really cool to good. It is their quality of badness which renders Resnick’s subjects formidable to their opponents and endearing to their admirers. Her confrontational images echo the primordial audacity of punk music and punk style. The art, literary and rock-and-roll worlds feature prominently in her work, which includes portraits of such enfants terribles as Andy Warhol, William Burroughs, John Belushi, Mick Jagger. Resnick defines a photo session as … “a kind of conversation. Photographic portraiture reveals how humans relate to each other, whether it be with deliberate staged artifice or with an abandonment of contrivance, revealing hints of genuine honesty. The viewer in turn, enters into the exchange while forming his own visceral relationship with the subject.” Resnick is an alumnus of the Cooper Union. She received an MFA from California Institute of the Arts and has taught photography at Queens College, ICP, Pratt and NYU, amongst others. The recipient of a CAPS and two NEA grants, she was the subject of an award winning short film, Bad Boys by Ron Mann and a video by Marjan Maggadan. Resnick’s work is published by Fotofolio in a series of postcards and is licensed by Retna, Ltd.]]>