Most people familiar with the art of Marcia Resnick know it through her smart and very funny photographs tracking the passage of a pre-adolescent girl into young womanhood (Re-visions, 1978).  But starting in her first photography class at Cooper Union, where she experimented broadly and wildly with the chemical possibilities of the medium, and her studies at the California Institute of the Arts, Resnick's work has conveyed a much wider-ranging exploration of the inherent, and often humorous, contraditions between art and reality as evidenced in her series See, See Changes, Landscape, and Landscape/Loftscape.

After these early bodies of work, made in the mid-1970s, and overlapping with the publication of her book, Re-visions (1978), Resnick photographed the burgeoning "demi-monde" of art and music in New York—the "bad boys" of the New York downtown music and arts scene—from 1977-1982, often on assignment for magazines and newpapers such as The Village VOICE, SoHo Weekly News, and New York magazine.  As Luc Sante asserts, she "was and remains the scene's memory, living the life even as she chronicled it."