Marcia Resnick took this picture of me back in the eighties. It’s got a bit of that era’s glam to it, no? Like a Vuarnet sunglasses ad in a French fashion magazine. Were we on the Riviera? St. Bart’s, maybe? 96 degrees in the shade, right?
Not even close. It was a chilly late September afternoon in Sullivan County, New York and I was damn uncomfortable. Marcia is trying to pose me like a Gumby doll (which I really do not appreciate), and it is way too cold for this. There is no way I (or anyone, for that matter) am going to get in that pool, and right now I really just want to put a shirt on. But Marcia sees this picture in her mind’s eye, and she is not going to rest until she gets it. “Rotate your shoulders more. No, from the waist— that’s it. Now, turn and face the sun. Pull your shoulder back. No, other shoulder. Yeah, like that.”
I’m thinking, “Why am I contorting myself like this? She has no idea what she’s doing.” Marcia has been partying all day, and I don’t think she can even see straight. She’s barely looking through the finder on her Nikon. I, meanwhile, am shooting with my Olympus, and I am getting wall-to-wall gems! We have been knocking about all day, and everywhere we go there are fabulous, photographable characters: among our friends at Robert Thurman’s surreal house in Shady, walking around in the town of Woodstock, and at the music festival with Steel Pulse headlining (Sam Rohn – 360 Panoramic VR Photography, you were there, and I think you were there, too, Dave Linn. Do you remember this day?).
When the film gets developed, almost every one of her shots looks like an album cover. That picture of me above looks like no other photo ever taken of me, before or since. And my photos? I had one good shot, and even that one sucked. Ah well. Time to start over. Again.
I had just dropped out of school and I was sofa-surfing downtown. When I look back on that time, I had no more direction in my life than a leaf has when it’s falling off a tree. I knew I wanted to finish school, but that was nowhere on the horizon at the moment. I would pick up a few bucks tending bar, loading trucks, or doing whatever the downtown cash economy offered. I had a passion for music, a lot of free time, and abundant curiosity.
Marcia and I had met a year earlier through mutual friends, the Rohns. In hindsight, it was pretty natural that Marcia’s loft on Canal Street would become a locus for me. There was always energy and activity moving through there, often with a cast of outrageous characters on hand: authors, actors, night creatures, junkies, musicians, students…. Maybe someone you had read about in The Village Voice or The Face. Hang out, talk to people. You might get invited to a gallery opening or get put on the guest list for a club event (“Yo, lemme get a plus one?”).
Guitarist Robert Quine comes to mind as one of them. I had seen him on stage with Richard Hell and the Voidoids, and with Lou Reed. I always found his playing fresh and original, never falling back on the rampant clichés that your average CBGB wannabe was playing. He was truly moving the needle on what could be done with a guitar in emerging rock music. Quine and I spent hours talking about music together in Marcia’s loft. Bob Quine shared a treasured memory of going to hear Coltrane in San Francisco—this had to be 1966—with Pharoah Sanders in the band and Albert Ayler sitting in (for Coltrane fans, this would be like being present for The Sermon on the Mount). Quine said he was right up front, with his head among the bells of the 3 tenor saxophones. He said he was never the same after that.
Marcia was sweet and kind and funny (usually), but in my experience, she was almost always thinking about her photo work. Specifically, her Bad Boys series, but also about photography in general. If she wasn’t doing a shoot, she was thinking about one, or she was developing some ideas, or she was… playing.
She would set up little scenarios for us to act out and for her to shoot. Here’s an example: she put me and Paley’s girlfriend Kevin face to face and shot us in profile. Before she shot a frame, she came around to me and whispered in my ear, “Kevin is the love of your life. You can’t believe you are so lucky as to be with her.” Then she went around to Kevin and whispered something in her ear that I couldn’t hear. She went back to the camera and fired away. Later, I asked Kevin what Marcia had said to her. She said, “You can’t stand Mitch. He’s a total piece of shit but you’re going to take him for all he’s worth.” When Marcia showed us the photo with my prominent nose opposite Kevin’s little ski slope, she told us the name of that photo: “A Jewish Mother’s Nightmare.”
(And whatever happened to that picture? I never got a copy of it. Everything seemed so immediately disposable back then. There was just more and more magic emerging around every corner in New York, and it seemed it would always be that way. No one kept anything. When I look back, the treasures that passed through my hands are just too many to count).
The loft was festooned with props and tools that Marcia might or might not go back to. This also contributed to it being a cool, interesting place to hang out. Hey, there’s that bondage mask that Belushi wears in that pic that Marcia took of him. I saw that one on a postcard on St. Mark’s Place. And that little piece-of-crap toy airplane? That’s the one Mick Jagger has between his jewel-encrusted teeth.
She did a whole series of me with cigarette smoke emerging from my mouth, as she had done with David Byrne. (I guess that was a thing back then, as a similar series of pics that emerged of Barack Obama, taken when he was a student at Columbia, demonstrate. I’m sure Marcia had done it first). I don’t remember any of them being particularly special.
Sometimes, she just shouted out stage directions as she shot: “Kill me with your eyes!” (Where’s THAT photo? That was a good one! Maybe it’s in a box somewhere). On rare occasion, she would say funny things that maybe opened a little window into what she really thought of me. “Just don’t get hit by a bus before the next time I see you.” I was never sure what to do with that.
As Marcia got to know me and trust me, she would ask me to be her photo assistant on shoots. We would go to The Roxy on Friday night (“Wheels of Steel night”) to shoot Afrika Bambaataa or to the Mayflower Hotel to shoot Gil Scott-Heron for the Village Voice. Surprisingly (to me, at least), she could be a little shy with artists she didn’t know. She seemed to like having someone to introduce her and let them know they were in good hands, whether I knew anything about setting up photo gear or not.
(Here’s a funny sidebar that fans of Deep Focus, my radio show and podcast, might appreciate. This shoot was the first time I met Gil Scott-Heron. As we are setting up, I initiate a little conversation to put him at ease. I ask him what music he’s been hearing that he likes. He names a bunch of pop and R&B, nothing you wouldn’t hear on commercial radio. I was enthralled at that time with David Murray, Air, Pullen-Adams Quartet, Blood Ulmer— edgy New York improv stuff— so I asked him, “Listening to any jazz?” Gil’s response: “It’s all jazz to me, man”).
Did she pay me for this? I don’t remember, but if she did, it wasn’t much, probably fifty bucks. Then again, $50 went a long way back then. I would put it in my right sock and I could nurse it for half a week.
Marcia was not exactly the cookie-cutter downtown denizen some might have taken her for. For one thing, she was not just taking snapshots of her famous friends. Marcia was seriously committed to the craft of picture-making. Look at her photos— really look. The lighting is deliberate, even when it’s simple; the skin is detailed and revealing. I had no idea that Marcia had a substantial academic background, but I absorbed a lot of information from her about how to look at pictures: contrast, grain, lenses, film stocks.
These days, looking back at Downtown in the seventies and eighties, it’s easy to see it as a black-and-white world. Marcia was actively engaged in creating an aesthetic framework for what she was capturing, but you can also look at her B&W work in terms of classical monochromatic photography (think black-and-white movies). She is thinking about value, contrast, the frame. Her color work is usually from arm’s length or farther. The really intimate stuff (with the notable exception of Johnny Thunders, with whom she had an adoring intimacy) is almost always black and white. She was immersed, as Ansel Adams said of his 35mm photography, in “…the ‘rightness’ of subject in relation to the apparatus.”
She was also very deliberate about who she chose to shoot as her “Bad Boys.” Much consideration was given to who was sufficiently bad, and why. Ed Koch? Really? Ask her and she would tell you what she was responding to in him.
There was a kind of anti-craft trend in commercial photography at the time. It had probably drifted in from art photography. You would go to a gallery show or pick up a trendy magazine and see these willfully poorly-produced images, with loud grain and high contrast, perhaps lit with an unmodified flash, or at least processed to look that way. Marcia abhorred this as a style. “Does this person have any idea what they are doing?! And who is choosing this to represent these overpriced shoes? Do they actually think this is good?”
And she was very ambitious, both creatively and professionally. She paid attention to which commissions and prizes her contemporaries, like Robert Mapplethorpe, got and which ones she had been passed over for. She knew she was good. She knew she had something of value that no one else had. It would be nice if the world recognized it.
And she had her demons and her resentments. She had had a falling out with a neighbor (a major downtown star, as it happened) over a water leak that had destroyed a bunch of her equipment, including her go-to camera. This was a major creative setback for her, maybe more of one than it should have been. She had a very hard time moving past it.
Mostly, though, the thing that people who didn’t know Marcia personally had no idea of was how hard she worked at it. The work was driven by this passion, and the passion was bottomless.
By the following spring, I had been spinning my wheels for long enough and I blew town again. I was gone for nearly a year, and by the time I came back, I was back in school, having transferred to an uptown institution. I didn’t completely lose touch with Marcia, but Little Jackie Paper came no more.
I didn’t see her often in the ensuing years, but she was on the radar. I knew she had endured some real trials, but by no means did I think of myself as one of her intimates with whom she would share such things. I figured I would see her when the time was right.
The last time I saw Marcia was one of those times. It was at the get-together for the release of her book, “Punks, Poets & Provocateurs” in 2015. She was surprised to see me, and I really appreciated her taking the time to introduce me to her co-author, Victor Bockris, and a few other friends. She had clearly come out the other side of her challenges. She seemed strong and sprightly and was clearly on a creative drive with this book being published (which I strongly recommend acquiring, btw). She inscribed the book to me with love, and it remains a real treasure in my house.
Through these years, much of my professional life has involved helping artists bring their work to fruition and finding an audience for it. I certainly wasn’t thinking of the time I spent with Marcia as “career development,” but in hindsight, that is part of what it was. I know I derived some satisfaction from that aspect of it, and maybe that drew me along to my next chapters.
There is a saying in photography that every photo is a self-portrait. This is most obvious in portrait photography, and it is rampant in Marcia’s work. Whether or not you think you are showing yourself to her, she is definitely showing herself to you: her spirit, how she engages the world, her sense of exploration and fun. This immediately creates a unique kind of intimacy. I don’t think I am John Belushi or Mick Jagger or Joey Ramone, but when I look at her pictures of them, I see that they are having the same experience of this that I used to have with her. It’s clear as day. I see Marcia Resnick clear as day.
https://www.nytimes.com/…/24/arts/marcia-resnick-dead.html