Marcia Resnick, a fine arts photographer who in the late 1970s pivoted from conceptual work to capture her febrile milieu, New York City’s downtown demimonde, in a series of intimate portraits, mostly of men, including the last studio photos taken of John Belushi, died on Wednesday in Manhattan. She was 74.
The cause of death, at a hospice facility, was lung cancer, her sister, Janice Hahn, said.
New York City was lurching out of its fiscal crisis as Ms. Resnick began careening through Manhattan’s after-hours spots, notably Max’s Kansas City, CBGB and the Mudd Club. She was living the life, to be sure, but also scouting for subjects.
Despite her madcap persona and punk-Lolita uniform — pleated schoolgirl skirts, thigh-high stockings and combat boots, beribboned pigtails and kohl-smudged eyes — she was deadly serious about her craft and her mission. Ms. Resnick was a skilled, CalArts-trained photographer determined to capture the scene that was swirling around her.
She photographed Debbie Harry and Chris Stein of the band Blondie sprawled on their bed in their 58th Street penthouse, looking like children at a sleepover.
She found the infamous lawyer Roy Cohn and Steve Rubell, the Studio 54 impresario, slumped on a sofa at the Mudd Club after sharing a quaalude; in her photo, Mr. Cohn radiates malevolence, while Mr. Rubell, his head resting on the other man’s shoulder, looks joyful and beatific.
She shot Klaus Nomi, the elfin New Wave opera singer who would die of AIDS in 1983, one of the city’s first casualties of the disease, in full Kabuki makeup. She shot Mayor Ed Koch in his office looking dapper and even sexy.
Ms. Resnick had that effect. She had a habit of dancing closer and closer to her subjects as she worked, often ending up in their laps. Her portrait of Joey Ramone renders him as a punk Caravaggio. His bony knees are poking through the holes in his shredded bluejeans, but his gaze, fixed directly at the camera, is grown-up and sultry.
“Joey never looked at me like that,” Danny Fields, the Ramones’ manager and default photographer, said in an interview. (Mr. Fields took thousands of pictures of the band.) “It’s like a courtship photo.”
Ms. Resnick had the flu when the writer Liz Derringer brought her to Mick Jagger’s Upper West Side apartment on New Year’s Eve in 1979, so that he could decide if he was comfortable with her taking the photos that would accompany Ms. Derringer’s forthcoming article about him in High Times magazine. Ms. Resnick, reviving herself with cocaine, won the assignment. A few days later, The New York Post reported that Mr. Jagger and the model Jerry Hall were vacationing in the Caribbean, recuperating from the flu.
Ms. Resnick frequently captured her subjects in the wild, but more often she took them home for overnight sessions at her Canal Street loft, in the building that she and other young artists had colonized in the mid-1970s.
Ms. Resnick had found the place, just off the West Side Highway, and invited friends to join her, among them Pooh Kaye, a dancer and choreographer, and Laurie Anderson, the avant-garde multimedia artist.
The first few months, they lived there like pioneers, with no city services. (The landlord told Ms. Resnick that he would connect the building to the grid only if she could fill it.) So they lugged water in buckets from a deli that had an outdoor spigot six blocks away. They kept warm with wood-burning stoves. Ms. Kaye remembered stuffing newspapers in her clothing when she slept. There was a methadone clinic on the first floor, which kept Ms. Resnick and her cohort safe: The security guards that patrolled the clinic were better protection than uptown doormen, and the clients were mostly benevolent.
It was during her Canal Street sessions that Ms. Resnick began to focus on male subjects, deliberately upending the age-old practice of men memorializing women. She wanted to subvert the male gaze. She called this work her “Bad Boy” series.
One night, she ran into Mr. Belushi at a club and asked him when he’d be ready to pose for her. “How about now?” he said, as she recalled in “Punks, Poets & Provocateurs: New York City Bad Boys, 1977-1982,” a collection of work that she published in 2015.
She didn’t believe him, and kept partying. When she made her way home at 6 a.m., Mr. Belushi was there in a limo with an entourage, and they all trooped up to her loft. Coming off a bender, he paced about before finally settling into a chair with a beer and a ski mask, which he had found among the array of props that Ms. Resnick kept for her portrait subjects and her conceptual work.
She took some 60 photos — Mr. Belushi as a pirate, Mr. Belushi looking boyish, Mr. Belushi sweating through a leather jacket — and then he passed out on her bed. His friends woke him half an hour later; they were on their way to the Hamptons to attend the wedding of Mr. Belushi’s “Saturday Night Live” boss, Lorne Michaels. Mr. Belushi died of a drug overdose six months later in Los Angeles.
William Burroughs was a kindred spirit, and Ms. Resnick photographed him often. When she was 17, she read “Junkie” (1953), his roman à clef, and then asked a friend to inject her with heroin every day for a week. It was her first experience with the drug. Later, she struggled with addiction for more than a quarter of a century, before beating it, on her own, in the early 2000s.
“Heroin turned the scene on, but then it destroyed it,” she told The Village Voice in 2015. “People live on in our work.”
Marcia Aylene Resnick was born on Nov. 21, 1950, in Brooklyn. Her mother, Sonia (Panich) Resnick was a publishing executive and a painter; her father, Herbert Resnick, owned a letterpress printing business.
Ms. Resnick studied art at New York University before switching to the Cooper Union, graduating in 1972. She earned a master’s degree in fine arts from the California Institute of the Arts in 1973. Returning to New York City, she taught at Queens College, the Cooper Union and N.Y.U.
Many of her early works were photographs of landscapes that she manipulated with paint. She then embarked on an autobiographical project called “Re-Visions,” which she staged in her loft, using a teenage model as her proxy, to explore a young woman’s coming of age in photos and text.
One image from this series is a photo of a balloon, looming from the shadows like a swollen belly and framed by a pair of hands with lacquered nails, one hand clutching a hatpin. The text reads, “She enjoyed making loud noises in quiet places.”
Ms. Resnick also had a bit of fun with a satirical column, “Resnick’s Believe-It-or-Not,” which ran in The SoHo Weekly News, a feisty competitor to The Village Voice. Each week, she paired an inscrutable photo with some mischievous text. For a shot of a pair of pants hanging on a laundry line, she wrote: “Ed E. Puss, a well-behaved boy from Sioux City, Iowa, was the first person in recorded history to have ‘hang ups.’” The “story” evolved, dizzyingly, from there.
In 1982, Ms. Resnick married Wayne Kramer, the lead guitarist of MC5, a Detroit rock band. They divorced a year later. Her sister is her only immediate survivor.
In 1977, Rolling Stone magazine asked Ms. Resnick and other up-and-coming photographers this question: “If you could be in any one situation anywhere, at any time, with anyone and any camera, what would it be?”
“I would like to be in bed with Iggy Pop and a Polaroid” was her answer, which led to an invitation to meet the so-called godfather of punk and his band, the Stooges, at a concert. (She did end up photographing him, but not in bed or with a Polaroid camera.)
“I sought provocateurs,” Ms. Resnick told The Village Voice. “It was just whatever I could do to get people in front of the camera. I wasn’t really famous, but I knew what I was doing.”
Penelope Green is a Times reporter on the Obituaries desk.
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