John Belushi, photo by Marcia Resnick
Marcia Resnick was there, at the center of it all, in a burst of light and flame that set New York on edge with a new movement in art, music, literature and film. Her new book Punks, Poets & Provocateurs: New York City Bad Boys, 1977-1982 with text by Victor Bockris (Insight Editions) features photographs of the enfants terribles of the time, people like Johnny Thunders, James Brown, William S. Burroughs, John Waters, and Jean-Michel Basquiat, men who did it their way like my man Frank Sinatra said. Marcia Resnick shares her thoughts and her photos in a conversation here.
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I love how you speak about creation of Re-visions as a way to demystify your past. Would you say the same is true of Punks, Poets & Provocateurs, or was the creation of the book driven by something else you wanted to explore about life?
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Marcia Resnick: In Re-visions I was confronting myself as the subject which I understood least and most wanted to understand. The next subject in line for such consideration was the male species, specifically my relationship to men, especially my attraction to “Bad Boys.”
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I like to think a portrait of the artist is always their subject: who they choose, the energy the two create, the frames they select—all of this is a story about the photographer themselves. When looking through Punks, Poets & Provocateurs I see a multi-faceted gem as filtered through the lens of the masculinity at a specific time and place. As a woman looking at men, what do you find most compelling about them? Is it something you see in yourself, something you aspire towards, or a mix of the two?
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Definitely a mix of the two. As I said in the book “Bad Boys can be at once formidable and endearing. Being ‘bad’ also makes people attractive, especially to the opposite sex.” I think most people are intrigued by danger regardless of what their sex is. Living on the edge is dangerous and Punk Rock was the new alternative music. The writers and provocateurs I photographed also went against the grain, making considerable innovations in their respective artistic endeavors.
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The Bad Boy archetype is an American ideal: the rebel driven by profound individualism—and maybe something else. In some ways it sums up the ethos of punk: fuck the system D.I.Y. style. Looking back, I’m a little shocked by how it doesn’t seem that long ago but it seems so very far away. What would you say made the era you were photographing so ripe for rebellion?
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In the late ‘70s and early ‘80s people could afford to live in NYC. Everyone was challenging what was expected of them because the counterculture was still ripe. Rock musicians and artists alike were graduating from art schools. Painters were making films. Writers were doing performance art. Sculptors were doing installations. Artists were acting in films, making music and generally collaborating with each other. People were also more sexually unconstrained. This climate ended when Aids and the atmosphere of paranoia began to stymie the nightlife.
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Punks, Poets & Provocateurs is an incredible compendium of the scene, very potent and resonant with a sense of energy that has, in some ways, all but disappeared. Looking back at your photographs, what mist resonates with you after all these years? What do you see in your photographs that you can only see now, with the benefit of hindsight?
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I realize how fortunate I was to experience NYC and life in general when I did. Though I embrace the extraordinary technological advances that have come in time, people today communicate through electronic media. Back then, the world seemed smaller, everyone knew who their friends were and people actually got together to talk and exchange ideas.
Divine, photo by Marcia Resnick