Said Marcia Resnick, quoted in "Marcia Resnick, photographer of punk’s heyday, dies at 74/She also took photos of actor John Belushi before his fatal drug overdose" (WaP)(free-access link, so you can see the photographs).
There was also this 1978 book "Re-visions" — "an autobiographical book of photography exploring female adolescence... One image showed a loaf of bread held against a woman’s groin, with the accompanying text: 'She first learned the facts of life from a friend while on a class trip to the bread factory.' The book sold out and brought her recognition among a bohemian crowd that included writer William S. Burroughs and artist Andy Warhol."
And from 1979 to 1981 she had "a satirical column for the alternative paper SoHo Weekly News called 'Resnick’s Believe-it-or-Not,' with such dubious hygienic advice as 'Spit at each other to keep clean' and 'Employees must NOT wash their hands.' Her column, which also featured her photographs, changed its name to 'Resnick’s Believe It' after a cease-and-desist order from the Ripley’s Believe It or Not! oddity franchise...."
You can look at what seems to be all of "Re-Visions" at Resnick's own website, here.
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16 comments:
I’m not able to see the pics. Oh well.
She may have been a pioneering female photographer, but why does she think she was a pioneering photographer of men? Most rock stars were men and so men would necessarily be the subject of most rock photography.
Where's the claim of "pioneering"? "I was intrigued by the bad guys and wanted to see what happened when a woman photographed a man, as the opposite was the norm in those days." Going against the norm ≠ pioneering. Personally wanting to see ≠ taking the first look.
My God these people are weird. Who wants to look at a yeasty vagina?
Resnick sounds like a shock artist who's work has now passed by the shock threshold she helped set. This happens in a degenerate culture like we have had in the West since about 1880. Aubrey Beardsley's pen & ink drawings for example, so scandalous at the time, are nothing today. The same as well with Diane Arbus or Robert Mapplethorpe and now this Resnick's work. Art like this only leads a race to the bottom and especially so when it's combined with an aggressively sociopathic commercial art scene as well.
She sounds like a poseur. When I was a kid the only photographers that I knew about were Annie Leibovitz and Linda McCartney.
I never like interior pictures that require an understanding of another picture to be understood. A lot of women's art is like that, i.e., men look at us way x but we are really x+. You could take those pictures with their captions and say: "here's one reason boys can't become girls; here's what real girls experience."
Revision of a Pin-Up.
Men like pinups of women wearing stockings and garters but women, seeing those pictures, remember getting runs in their stockings just after after going through all the trouble of getting seams straight and snapping on garters and so having to do it all again and "do I have another pair" and "maybe I have to borrow from my sister who is taller and they will wrinkle around my ankles" and "is the run high enough that I can stop it with nail polish and wear them anyway?"
Really, Revisions is amusing and the show brings back a buried life but after awhile a relentless focus on social anxieties makes me feel claustrophobic.
Wicked expressions or solutions. Choices.
As for the photographs of John Belushi, if that was my son or brother (woman's point of view) I would feel very concerned but I would feel the same about all of his photographs, and his movies too. And I did at the time. Simultaneously, as a movie-goer, I just laughed (man's point of view).
Maybe she learned about Yeast Infections at the bread factory.
Chuck Schumer’s high school classmate. She was second in the class and I bet Chuck was first. He brags about getting a perfect score on the SAT.
Punks didn't "earn a reputation for evil," they were seen as anti-social anarchists who liked to intimidate people. It's really funny how so many people who weren't there misread what the punk movement was about. (But still feel that they have to pontificate about it.)
The photos have that Lynda Barry "adolescents presented as ugly adults" vibe.
"Bad" did mean "good" in the 70s. Maybe it still does.
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Refer back to John Cameron Mitchell who told us about loving, kindly, caring punkism a month or two ago.
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Schumer, the story goes, worked for exam coach Stanley Kaplan and took the SATs over and over and over again to come up with his perfect score. That was sort of the lesson wasn't it? That whatever the exam's founders thought, raw intelligence alone wasn't going to get you into Harvard.
You've been punked is the objective of green deals.
"She also took photos of actor John Belushi before his fatal drug overdose"
Would have been a little weird to take them after.
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