Art Photography Book Design

A SUCCESS STORY

Living and working in New York City, my sister, Marcia Resnick, an acclaimed art photographer, conceived the idea of a book of portraitures called Bad Boys: Punks, Poets and Provocateurs – portraits of extraordinary men taken from 1977 to 1982 in New York City.

After over 3 decades, we had compiled her portraits and combined our creative energies. She commissioned me to design the book. Victor Bockris, published biographer and long-time friend of Marcia, was writer of most of the text of the book. In short, the book is a journey through a period of time, photographing the New York City counterculture of artists, writers, directors, musicians and political pundits.

After a 5 year exchange of creative ideas, we finalized the book. Marcia signed with California based publisher, Insight Editions in 2014. My role was as Design Consultant with their art directors and editors until the book release in November 2015. “Punks, Poets and Provocateurs” went through many design revisions, which was expected since publishers have their own design standards. But I was able to have creative input during the metamorphosis. The final title of the book, Punks, Poets and Provocateurs, subtitled New York City BAD BOYS 1977 to 1982.

When the NYC gallery, Howl! Happening, planned Marcia’s one-woman photography exhibition it was necessary for Marcia and I to play a major part in curating the show. After a thorough floor plan review of the exhibit space, I generated six (6) detailed installation digital wall renderings of the framed photographs, which I provided to the gallery director.

CLICK below to enlarge the book jacket.

ABOUT THE PHOTOGRAPHER: MARCIA RESNICK

I enjoy the confrontation and collaboration implicit in a photographic portrait session. The musicians in my images are often enfant terribles who have unique charisma and who live on the edge. Taken in New York City between 1977 and 1982, these photographs explore the fame, sexuality and individual style of Rock and Rollers.

MARCIA RESNICK first exhibited her art at the Brooklyn Children’s Museum when she was five years old – a drawing of a blond Asian lady standing on a stage. In third grade, she took her first photograph entitled “Miss Wolf and the Seals at the Aquarium.” These two events foretold the course of her life. After studying art at NYU and Cooper Union, she went to graduate school at California Institute of the Arts, where she studied conceptual art with John Baldessari and Allen Kaprow. It was the early 1970s when she began to study photography, which was finally becoming accepted as a fine art.

After returning to New York City in 1975, Marcia Resnick self-published three conceptual artist books, Landscape, See and Tahitian Eve. In 1976, she began to work on a series of photographic reconstructions of memories of her early life. This compilation of humorous images about female adolescence, each complemented with a short text, was published as Re-visions by The Coach House Press in Toronto in 1978. The late 1970s pulsated with an electric energy. Conceptual art and interdisciplinary art replaced Minimal Art. 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 collaborating with each other.

It was in this milieu that she taught photography at Queens College and NYU by day and went out every night to hear music at CBGB’s, Max’s and the Mudd Club, which was also a venue for various artistic events, film showings, readings and theme parties. Guilty at spending so much time in clubs, she convinced herself that photographic forays into the night, was her art. After taking candid pictures backstage or in dressing rooms at clubs, she would often invite people to her studio for photo sessions where atmosphere could be generated, lighting could be manipulated and props could be employed. Her work with the Soho Weekly News, New York Magazine and other periodicals gave her access to photograph people who were well known in the popular culture.

After Re-visions, she traveled to Egypt alone and became the virtual prisoner of a deranged Arab soldier. Good out of bad, this abrupt exposure to ungovernable maleness led her next great subject: Bad Boys. Compelled to record the emotional geography of the human face, she submerged herself in portraiture. The fact that she was a woman photographing men was crucial to the dynamic of her project.

Combining confrontation with collaboration, she explored fame, sexuality and individual style. While photographing Johnny Thunders, John Lydon and other leading figures in the punk music scene, her focus broadened to include portraits from all the arts, including cultural icons Andy Warhol, William Burroughs, John Belushi and Mick Jagger. Her photographs are exhibited internationally and are in major museum collections including the Museum of Modern Art, NYC, Metropolitan Museum of Art, NYC, National Portrait Gallery, Washington DC, George Eastman House, Rochester, Museum of Fine Arts, Houston, New York Public Library, Jewish Museum, NYC, Rijksmuseum, Amsterdam and Getty Museum, Los Angeles.