JIMMY DESANA . Part 2: Submission (1979) / Suburban (2015)

ALL PHOTOS COURTESY OF THE ESTATE OF JIMMY DESANA
Thank you to everyone who contributed to this project

SUBMISSION (1979)

DeSana, Jimmy; William Burroughs

New York, NY: SCAT Publications, 1979. First Edition. Paperback. 

Jimmy DeSana collaborated with William S. Burroughs on the self-published cult classic. Burroughs wrote the introduction to this collection of photographs which was published under the SCAT moniker.

Pages of introductory text are followed by 30 selected black-and-white photographs. DeSana's photography has been described as "anti-art" in its approach to capturing images of the human body, in a manner ranging from "savagely explicit to purely symbolic". 

 
 

SUBURBAN (2015)

Suburban collects in print for the first time DeSana's surreally lyrical, sexually charged photographs from his series of the same name, made in the late 1970s through the 1980s. DeSana staged photos of nude subjects, male and female, in various strange, evocative poses, entwined with everyday objects and luridly lit with gel-covered tungsten lights. The photographs suggest broad physical comedy as much as sadomasochism. “I don't really think of that work as erotic”, DeSana has said of this series. “I think of the body almost as an object. I attempted to use the body but without the eroticism that some photographers use frequently. I think I de-eroticized a lot of it but that is the way the suburbs are in a sense”. At a moment of growing interest in DeSana's life and work, this volume (edited by Dan Nadel and DeSana's longtime roommate and friend Laurie Simmons) offers access to a critical—and previously unpublished—early body of the photographer's work.

Aperture Foundation, 27 Oct 2015, 96p, by Jimmy DeSana, Laurie Simmons (Editor), Dan Nadel (Editor), Elisabeth Sussman (Text by)

ENDEthan ShoshanFebruary 9, 2021