Marcia Resnick: Re-Visions - (Hardcover)

Book Synopsis

A facsimile edition of Marcia Resnick's 1978 artist's book depicting adolescent girlhood in staged photographs

When the celebrated New York photographer Marcia Resnick (born 1950) was involved in a car crash in 1975, she saw her whole life flash before her eyes. Inspired by this procession of memories, Resnick decided to revisit her childhood memories in a series of staged photographs that she would eventually publish as the artist's book Re-visions in 1978.

Accompanied by texts, these black-and-white photographs convey a surreal and often darkly humorous depiction of the trials and tribulations of girlhood: in one image, a girl kisses a Howdy Doody doll above the text "She secretly lusted for her television idols;" in another, the phrase "They were continually telling her that she had stars in her eyes" accompanies a photograph of two jacks resting on a girl's closed eyelids.

This is the first facsimile edition of what has become a classic of 1970s artist's book publishing.

Review Quotes

Resnick's images all have the confessional feeling of self portraiture... They are conceptual, they are literary fictions, all done with a style of make-shift / thrift store theatricality that just seems inventive and charming.--Timothy Archibald

[A] historically significant and groundbreaking photobook by a woman.--Olga Yatskevich "Lensculture"

Re-visions dares to be perverse in this age of rules and enforced correctness...[Resnick's] thoughts reveal the restlessness of budding adolescence and the curiosity and lustfulness that, especially in that era, were reserved for boys.--Scott Stiffler "Chelsea Community News"

Re-visions, comprises staged photographs of a female adolescence, and falls somewhere between fiction and reality.--Belle Hutton "AnOther"

Re-Visions is an important photobook by a woman photographer that deserves to be more consistently included with other feminist photography classics from the 1970s.--Olga Yatskevich "Collector Daily"

Resnick began to revisualise her memories, combining text and image to augment the irony and humor of the experience of growing up as a woman.--Marigold Warner "British Journal of Photography"

Resnick's photographic portraits explore fame, sexuality and individual style.--Aline Smithson "Lenscratch"