Ahead of Her Time

Deborah Bell Photographs presents Ahead of Her Time: Marcia Resnick, the gallery's fifth exhibition of photographs by the artist. As the writer Nick Paumgarten opined last year in The New Yorker, the Resnick retrospective and accompanying catalogue "brings out of the attic of cultural oversight a wild record of her largely unheralded contributions to the evolution of photography as a fine art, and of her mostly unacknowledged place among the so-called Pictures Generation, to go with her better-known perch as a chronicler of the Blank Generation." Many of the photographs featured in the retrospective will be exhibited in this gallery show, including ones Resnick made as early as 1968 as a student at Cooper Union. Also on view will be work from four series created soon after her graduation from Cal Arts: See; See Changes; Landscape; and Landscape/Loftscape, in which she pursued a wide-ranging exploration of the inherent, often humorous, contradictions between art and reality. Engaging with the idea of the artist's book, Resnick embarked in 1974 upon a series of photographs called See -- "photographs of people photographing places." In an interview with Alex Sweetman at the School of the Art Institute of Chicago in 1978, published in Exposure (16:2), she said: "I found that when I went to tourist spots, there would be people looking at places and they'd always get in the way and I'd always see them from behind. That was the whole [Maurice] Merleau-Ponty kind of pholosophical thing: being in front and being behind -- like being inside of yourself. I was interested also at that time in the iconography of body gestures. How you could read, from the way a person's body was from the back, almost as much, or as much, as you could see from looking at a face in a portrait." In her 1974 series See Changes, Resnick portrays her Cal Arts classmate James Welling perched on the edge of the Grand Canyon in an intriguing series of photographs manipulated and altered with pencil, all produced from a single negative. Resnick dove further into the nature of landscape photography and photographic "reality" in her next two projects. Landscape (1975) melds an "incredible elaboration of nothing...my statement about Minimalist art" with a sardonic take on the cliché of the beautifully photographed landscape. For her series Landscape/Loftscape (1976), Resnick has explained: "I had all these landscape images in my house, and I was stuck in New York, so I started to recreate the landscapes in miniature and photograph them, so that they would look just like the original photographs of landscapes. It's a comment on photography and how it flattens dimensions and how a photograph isn't really the thing itself. A photograph of Texas isn't Texas. A re-creation of Texas is just as much Texas as the photograph of Texas." Resnick was included in 1975, along with John Baldessari, Thomas Barrow, Michael Bishop, Richard Schaeffer, and William Wegman, in the ground-breaking exhibition The Extended Document: An Investigation of Information and Evidence in Photographs at The George Eastman House. Most people familiar with the art of Marcia Resnick know it through her landmark book Re-visions, released in 1978 to critical acclaim from her artistic and literary peers, among them William Burroughs, Andy Warhol, and Allen Ginsberg. This series of smart and very funny photographs with text tracks the passage of a pre-adolescent girl into young womanhood. Along with her friend William Wegman, Resnick was a precursor to a broad range of artists, including Cindy Sherman, engaged in photographic storytelling. Featured also will be Resnick's portraits of musicians, artists, and writers chosen from her book Punks, Poets and Provocateurs: NYC Bad Boys 1977-1982 (Insight Editions, 2015). Of these evocative portraits of enfants terribles the art critic Vince Aletti remarks, "Resnick wasn't just another photographer buzzing around New York's lively downtown scene...she was something of an insider, and her most arresting pictures have an intimacy and immediacy that haven't faded." Selections from her column Resnick’s Believe-It-Or-Not, published in the SoHo Weekly News during the same period, will also be on view. Marcia Resnick was born in Brooklyn in 1950. She received her BFA from The Cooper Union, New York City, in 1972, and her MFA from the California Institute of the Arts in Valencia, CA, in 1973. Resnick's photographs can be found in numerous institutional collections, including the Amon Carter Museum, Fort Worth; Bowdoin College Museum of Art, Brunswick; Carnegie Museum of Art, Pittsburgh; Frances Lehman Loeb Art Center, Vassar College, Poughkeepsie; George Eastman Museum, Rochester; Harry Ransom Center, Austin; Harvard University Art Museums, Cambridge; Herbert F. Johnson Museum of Art, Cornell University, Ithaca; J. Paul Getty Museum, Los Angeles; Solomon R. Guggenheim Museum, New York; Jewish Museum, New York; Los Angeles County Museum of Art; Metropolitan Museum of Art, New York; Morgan Library & Museum, New York; Museum of Modern Art, New York; Museum of Fine Arts, Houston; National Gallery of Art, Washington, DC; National Portrait Gallery, Washington, DC; Nelson-Atkins Museum of Art, Kansas City; New Orleans Museum of Art; New York Public Library; Rijksmuseum, Amsterdam; Ryerson Image Center, Toronto; San Francisco Museum of Modern Art; Santa Barbara Museum of Art; and Worcester Art Museum. This exhibition is held in association with Paul M. Hertzmann, Inc., San Francisco.

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