RIP Marcia Resnick

Marcia Resnick with Andy Warhol and William Burroughs in 1980 

Photo by Victor Bockris via @marcia.resnick 

Marcia Resnick, a photographer known for her striking portraits of cultural figures from the Downtown New York art scene of the 1970s and 1980s — including Jean-Michel Basquiat, John Belushi, Johnny Thunders and Mick Jagger — died on June 17. She was 74. 

The cause was lung cancer, her sister Janice Hahn told The Washington Post. 

A Brooklyn native, Resnick graduated from Cooper Union in 1972 and earned a master of fine arts from the California Institute of the Arts in 1973, where she studied with artist John Baldessari. 

In a bio recounting her early years, Resnick described teaching photography at Queens College and NYU by day, and spending her nights immersed in the city's punk and art scenes — photographing musicians and artists at venues like CBGB, Max's Kansas City and the Mudd Club. 

"Guilty at spending so much time in clubs, I convinced myself that my photographic forays into the night were my art," she wrote. 

Her work for publications like the SoHo Weekly News and New York Magazine gave her access to many of the era's key cultural figures, whom she often photographed both candidly and in stylized studio sessions. 

Many of these portraits were featured in her 2015 book, "Punks, Poets and Provocateurs: New York City Bad Boys 1977–1982," one of several she published during her career. 

"She was the person who connected most with that scene and reproduced it in the photographs and all its people," her friend and collaborator Victor Bockris told The Washington Post. 

Her work is held in the permanent collections of the Museum of Modern Art, the Metropolitan Museum of Art, the National Portrait Gallery in Washington, D.C., and the Getty Museum in Los Angeles, among others. The George Eastman Museum called her "one of the most ambitious and innovative American photographers of the 1970s."