An Interview with Marcia Resnick

In the spring of 2020, only months after the BCMA’s galleries closed to the public on account of the global pandemic, Casey Riley (Minneapolis Institute of Art), Lisa Hostetler (formerly George Eastman Museum), and the BCMA’s co-director Frank Goodyear arranged an oral history project with New York photographer Marcia Resnick. The three had recently decided to work together to create an exhibition and a catalogue and thought that an extended interview would be useful at the outset of the project. Conducted in a series of three-hour sessions over three days, this oral history was instrumental in the development of the new exhibition, which opened on February 24 at the BCMA and which will travel to Minneapolis, MN, and Rochester, NY, after its presentation in Brunswick.

During the 1970s and early 1980s, Resnick was a leader in the photographic movement to reconsider what a photograph could be. Moving beyond a more traditional documentary mode, she created more than a dozen distinct series that explored new approaches to picture-making. Resnick and the exhibition’s curators will visit campus on Thursday, March 4. Please join us at 4:30 pm at the BCMA for an in-person conversation about the exhibition.

Below are excerpts from this oral history. In this selection, Resnick speaks about her beginnings as a photographer.

Frank Goodyear: Could you start by talking a little bit about your family and growing up in New York City in the 1950s and ’60s?

Marcia Resnick: My father was a printer, and he had his own shop on Brighton Beach Avenue in Brooklyn. My mother was a homemaker while I was growing up and she made paintings—perfect copies of Van Gogh’s. We grew up with the Mona Lisa, brush stroke for brush stroke, in our living room.

I was always drawing, and my parents encouraged it. They gave me a Jon Gnagy set. My father sold them in his store. But my parents were both very clean people. What is it, the disorder?

Casey Riley: Obsessive compulsive?

Marcia Resnick: Yeah, they were OCD before OCD existed. They were always cleaning everything; I couldn’t get crumbs on the floor, and I had to take my shoes off when I walked in. I had a little rectangle of a table, and I would be drawing on rectangular pieces of paper. And they told me that I couldn’t get anything outside of the rectangle.

That rectangle stuck with me, and I think that’s why I identify with the camera. I mean I was painting on rectangles but somehow it was like my world was within a rectangle. And it made sense finally when I got a camera in college.

I was always drawing and painting. My father put a drawing of mine in the window of his shop, and a woman saw it and she put me in my first group show at the New York Children’s Museum...

Casey Riley:When did you start making photographs?

Marcia Resnick: New York University. I took photography as an undergraduate at NYU. My professor was not a good teacher because he did not communicate the right things to us students. But I was intrigued by the camera. I did self-portraits. And I experimented visually with a lot of different things. I took pictures walking. I walked and took pictures of people sitting in Washington Square Park.

Later when I was a student at Cooper Union, I got to meet a lot of different artists. When Allan Kaprow came to New York to talk to us about the arts in California, I was intrigued with the idea of living there because it was so different. The light was different, and the amount of experimentation was different. People were doing manipulated photographs; this kind of photography was popular in California, but not in New York.

Frank Goodyear: Were there particular artists or photographers who were important to you in those early years?

Marcia Resnick: Yeah, Robert Heineken. I wanted to study with him, and he and Robbert Flick were the head of the department at UCLA. I really wanted to go to UCLA, but they didn’t let me in. I decided instead to go to CalArts [California Institute of the Arts].

Frank Goodyear: At this point, did you think that you wanted to be a photographer, as opposed to being an artist and working in a variety of mediums?

Marcia Resnick: Photography was my medium. Taking pictures was my thing that I did. I was really serious about taking pictures.

Lisa Hostetler: You were involved with the Vietnam War and the counterculture. Did you associate any of those activities with photography and art making, or were politics and art just two different things?

Marcia Resnick: I liked taking pictures at demonstrations. I liked to photograph unusual things. When I was at Cooper Union, I was painting paintings of my friends, and then I was photographing them looking at the paintings I made of them. And the paintings would be of them looking at themselves in the mirror, so it was this triple situation.

I did portraits from a distance because I liked arranging the rectangle in a certain way. I never cropped my pictures. Only recently have I started; I crop my pictures all the time now in Photoshop.

Casey Riley: Were you taught not to crop them? Was that part of the way they were teaching you that it had to be in a frame?

Marcia Resnick: Right. You were supposed to develop an eye and everything that was in the viewfinder was what you were photographing. Supposedly everything mattered.

After I got out of college, I initially didn’t photograph people anymore. In the series Re-visions you don’t see any faces because they’re not portraits, they’re constructions. That’s what I was doing essentially: I was constructing photographs even when I was just looking. At the time I didn’t realize how much I was developing a vision. I mean gradually I knew that I was.

The exhibition Marcia Resnick: As It Is or Could Be is on view at the Bowdoin College Museum of Art through June 5, 2022.