Jimmy DeSana (James Arthur DeSana; 12 November 1949 – 27 July 1990) was an American artist and a key figure in New York’s East Village punk and New Wave scenes of the 1970s and 1980s. His photography has been described as “anti-art” in its approach to the human body, ranging from savagely explicit to purely symbolic. He collaborated closely with photographer Laurie Simmons; writer William S. Burroughs introduced DeSana’s self-published collection Submission. Commercial credits include the album cover for Talking Heads’ More Songs About Buildings and Food and John Giorno’s LP You’re The Guy I Want To Share My Money With.
For kink-aware art history, DeSana is downtown proof that S&M aesthetics, queer experimental portraiture, and punk celebrity culture shared the same night—and that those negatives later entered MoMA and the Whitney, not only private scrapbooks.
Early Life and Education
DeSana was born in Detroit, Michigan, on 12 November 1949, son of James Arthur DeSana and Josephine Earle Graves. He grew up in Atlanta, Georgia. As a teenager he already photographed friends and acquaintances nude—early practice for a career that never treated the body as a polite secondary subject. After studying at the University of Georgia he moved to New York in 1972 (settling into the city’s art life by 1973).
In New York the portrait list became a who’s who of downtown culture: Kathy Acker, Laurie Simmons, Kenneth Anger, David Byrne, Brian Eno, Laurie Anderson, Debbie Harry, Patti Astor, and others. Early photographs show friends posing in houses and gardens; the domestic frame later becomes uncanny when suburban interiors turn into stages for precarious nudes and fetish-adjacent props.
Punk Art, Bodies, and the Turn to Explicit Staging
The human body remained primary. DeSana’s work appeared in the “Punk Art” exhibition co-curated by Marc H. Miller, Bettie Ringma, and Alice Denney at the Washington Project for the Arts (15 May–10 June 1978). The show placed him inside a cohort that treated punk as visual culture, not only music.
Writing in 1991, critic Brooks Adams called the 1979 publication Submission “rather extraordinary,” arguing it “did much to usher in the ’80s genre of grotesque or blatantly fictive and often preposterously homoerotic, S&M photography.” What had been a “raunchy late ’70s curiosity item,” Adams wrote, had become an early-’90s collectible—“an art-historically resonant bibelot.” That trajectory—from scene document to museum object—is the DeSana story in miniature.
Submission, with Burroughs’s introduction, is the title most often cited when BDSM-interested viewers claim DeSana. The photographs stage domination, restraint energies, and bodily risk as composed art problems rather than as documentary of a dungeon. The mood can be cold, funny, erotic, or all three at once.
From Black-and-White to Color: Suburban and Remainders
DeSana worked in black and white until about 1980, then began serious color experiment. The Suburban series includes neo-surreal, staged photographs of nude bodies and mundane objects. Johanna Fateman later described how he “troubled suburban interiors with nude models in precarious poses, recasting everyday objects as BDSM props in his spare, elegant tableaux.” A chair, a hallway, a household tool—re-seen as apparatus—connects his art directly to fetish photography’s habit of eroticizing the ordinary through context and pose.
The Remainders series marks a move away from the human body toward objects through abstraction: balloons, flour, aluminum foil, dreamily lit in spectral hues. DeSana began these works shortly after his HIV diagnosis in 1985. The shift reads, in retrospect, as both formal exploration and a mortal artist’s renegotiation of what the camera should hold when the body itself is under siege.
Exhibitions During His Lifetime
His first exhibition was in 1979 at the Stefanotti Gallery on West 57th Street in New York. Solo shows followed at venues including Wilkinson Gallery (London), Pat Hearn Gallery (New York), Galerie Jacques de Windt (Brussels), and the Museum of the Twentieth Century in Vienna. He was featured in Diego Cortez’s 1981 P.S.1 exhibition New York/New Wave alongside Jean-Michel Basquiat, Sarah Charlesworth, Kenny Scharf, and others—cementing his place in the downtown canon that museums later historicized.
Death and Estate
DeSana died at Memorial Sloan Kettering Cancer Center on 27 July 1990 from an AIDS-related illness. He left his estate to Laurie Simmons. For nearly a decade the estate was co-managed by Simmons and Salon 94 gallery; in 2022 it was announced that management would also involve P.P.O.W. Gallery. Estate stewardship has been central to the posthumous boom in publications and museum shows.
Later Exhibitions and the Retrospective Wave
In 2013, “Party Picks,” a selection of work from 1975 to 1987, showed at Salon 94. Pioneer Works presented archival suites in 2016. In 2017, Cibachrome photographs appeared in the group show “Body Language” at Company gallery. In 2020, “The Sodomite Invasion: Experimentation, Politics and Sexuality in the work of Jimmy DeSana and Marlon T. Riggs” opened at Griffin Arts Project in North Vancouver—pairing DeSana with Riggs’s experimental queer cinema/politics.
DeSana’s first museum retrospective opened at the Brooklyn Museum in late 2022 and ran into 2023, curated by art historian Drew Sawyer alongside Laurie Simmons. The show framed him as a pioneering yet under-recognized documenter and inventor within NYC’s downtown art, music, and film scenes. Meyer Riegger in Berlin showed fifty-three works beginning 4 November 2023. KW Institute for Contemporary Art in Berlin scheduled a 2024 exhibition; 2024 also saw DeSana’s first Asia exhibition in Seoul. The geographic spread—New York, Vancouver, Berlin, Seoul—marks full art-world canonization decades after death.
Publications
- 101 Nudes — offset prints in custom portfolio box; fifty-six parts, each 11×14 inches (1972/91)
- Submission — introduction by William Burroughs (1979); later major reissue edited by Drew Sawyer with preface by Anne Pasternak and epilogue by Laurie Simmons (Delmonico Books/Brooklyn Museum, 2022)
- Jimmy DeSana: Suburban — texts by Laurie Simmons, Dan Nadel, and Elisabeth Sussman (Salon 94, 2015)
- The Sodomite Invasion — Griffin Arts Project volume pairing DeSana and Riggs (2022)
- Salvation — edited by James Hoff and Laurie Simmons Studio; designed by Rick Myers (Primary Information, 2024)
- Quotations from Jimmy DeSana — edited by James Hoff; designed by Rick Myers (Primary Information, 2024)
- A.R.T. Press monograph with Laurie Simmons, Roberta Smith, and William S. Bartman (1990)
Museum Collections
Institutional holdings include the Institute of Contemporary Art (Boston), the Metropolitan Museum of Art, the Museum of Contemporary Art (Chicago), the Museum of Fine Arts (Houston), the Museum of Modern Art (New York), and the Whitney Museum of American Art. That list is the final argument against treating his S&M-inflected staging as disposable scene ephemera.
Further Reading and Cultural Memory
Critical writing includes Bruce Hainley’s Artforum attention (1995), abstraction surveys that place his color work in wider photographic debates, and the online catalogue legacy of the 1978 Punk Art show. Laurie Simmons’s later public homage—including media tied to amfAR and conversations involving her daughter, writer Lena Dunham—has kept DeSana’s name in intergenerational queer and feminist art discourse.
For readers of this site: DeSana matters because he made submission, precarious posing, and fetishized objects legible as serious contemporary art without sanding off the erotic charge. Submission is not a dungeon handbook; it is a visual argument that power, humor, and bodily risk can be composed—and that punk New York’s nightlife aesthetics deserved the same archival care as any other modernist experiment. From Atlanta teenage nudes to P.S.1, from Burroughs’s intro to a Brooklyn Museum retrospective, the arc is complete: the “anti-art” body photographer entered the museum, carrying leather-adjacent fantasy with him.
