Jimmy DeSana: Submission, Color, and East Village Bodies

Jimmy DeSana, James Arthur DeSana, was a central figure in New York’s East Village punk and New Wave scenes of the 1970s and 1980s. His photographs treat the body as “anti-art,” from savagely explicit to purely symbolic. They are one record of how BDSM aesthetics, queer experimental portraiture, and punk celebrity culture occupied the same rooms. Prints later entered the Museum of Modern Art and the Whitney Museum of American Art.

He was born in Detroit in 1949 and grew up in Atlanta, Georgia. As a teenager he was already photographing friends nude. The body was never a polite side subject. He moved to New York in 1972 and was quickly inside the art life of the city. The portraits include Kathy Acker, David Byrne, and Debbie Harry. Early pictures show friends posing in houses and gardens. When the setting shifts to suburban interiors, the nudes get precarious and the props sit close to fetish. Ordinary rooms start to feel wrong.

For viewers who care about BDSM, the book most often named is Submission, self-published in 1979, with an introduction by William S. Burroughs. Critic Brooks Adams argued that the publication helped usher in the 1980s genre of grotesque, often absurdly homoerotic S&M photography. Domination, the energy of restraint, and bodily risk are composed as pictures. They are not a documentary of a dungeon. The mood can be cold, funny, or erotic. The models are adults. What had looked like a raunchy late-1970s curiosity was, by the early 1990s, a collectible with a place in art history.

Suburban color, then Remainders

Around 1980 DeSana moved from black and white into serious color. The Suburban series is neo-surreal staging: nude models in precarious poses unsettle suburban rooms. Johanna Fateman described how, in spare and elegant frames, he recast chairs, hallways, and household tools as BDSM props, the fetish habit of making ordinary objects erotic through context and pose. After an HIV diagnosis in 1985 he made the Remainders series, turning toward objects and abstract light: balloons, flour, aluminum foil. The shift is a formal experiment and a renegotiation of what the camera should hold when the body itself is under threat.

Exhibitions, the estate, and the covers

The exhibition list starts with a first solo show in 1979 at Stefanotti Gallery in New York and includes the 1981 group show “New York/New Wave” at P.S.1. He died on 27 July 1990 of an AIDS-related illness. He left the estate to Laurie Simmons, the photographer he had worked with closely. For nearly a decade Simmons and Salon 94 co-managed the estate. From 2022 P.P.O.W. Gallery joined the management. In late 2022 the Brooklyn Museum opened his first museum retrospective, curated by art historian Drew Sawyer with Simmons, and placed him as a pioneering figure in New York’s art, music, and film scenes. Later shows reached Berlin and Seoul.

The commercial credits include the cover of Talking Heads’ More Songs About Buildings and Food and the cover of John Giorno’s record You’re The Guy I Want To Share My Money With. Primary Information has published monographs including Salvation and Quotations from Jimmy DeSana. Simmons has kept his name in later queer and feminist art conversation. Submission is not a dungeon handbook. The pictures argue that power, humor, and bodily risk can be composed.