JIMMY DESANA . Part 1: 1949-1990
ALL PHOTOS COURTESY OF THE ESTATE OF JIMMY DESANA
Thank you to everyone who contributed to this project
Jimmy DeSana, 1949-1990, was born in Detroit on November 12, 1949, where he lived until his family relocated to Atlanta in 1955. DeSana studied art in high school and at the University of Georgia in Atlanta. He came of age in the 1970’s in New York City, alongside fellow artist-photographers Cindy Sherman, Nan Goldin and Laurie Simmons.
An iconic figure and witness of the countercultural New York “punk” scene, of artists and musicians living in New York’s East Village in the 1970s and ’80s, Jimmy DeSana developed more secretly an intense body of work in parallel to his spirited chronicle of the Lower East side alternative music movement.
While using photography, the artist could also be described as a sculptor. The performative body is considered as a prop. Carefully constructed poses merge with mundane surroundings. Quirky juxtapositions of skin and texture, humorous choreographies of alienation set an erotic tone aroused by both constraint and exhibitionism.
DeSana delineated his love of objects and the exemplary lie of photography in an interview with Diego Cortez in 1986: “A photograph is how much you want to lie, how far you want to stretch the truth about the object. And, as photography is always based on real objects, it lends itself, by means of technique or manipulation, to explorations of what may appear to be an absence of reality, balancing on an ambiguous line between concrete and abstract space, between reality and illusion in a way that no other medium is able to do.” DeSana’s career began as it ended – in the exploration of those various balanced betweens.
With over a dozen solo exhibitions during his lifetime, DeSana’s monograph, “Submission” (Scat Publications, 1979), is considered an essential photographic publication of the era. Throughout his career, DeSana’s work was featured in over fifty group exhibitions including the seminal 1981 P.S1 exhibition New York/New Wave. DeSana died in 1990 of complications from AIDS, after what he described as “a decade of death and money”.
His work continues to be exhibited and acclaimed nationally and internationally.
DeSana contributed regularly to the Soho Weekly News, the East Village Eye, and Filemagazine. He shot album covers for Downtown bands and made portraits of Downtown musical luminaries, as well as the Underground’s elder statesmen, including William Burroughs, Kenneth Anger, and Jack Smith. He was a contemporary of Robert Mapplethorpe and David Wojnarowicz.
