Photographers

Photographer

Jimmy DeSana

Biography

The English Wikipedia entry establishes the core biography: Jimmy DeSana (1949–1990) was an American photographer born in Detroit who worked in New York City from the early 1970s. It describes his staged, deliberately artificial images of bodies — subjects bound, masked, or crossed by light — and ties his practice to the downtown art, music, and queer subcultures of the era, and to the loose grouping later called the Pictures Generation. It also records his self-published 1972 book 101 Nudes and his death from AIDS-related illness in 1990, supplying the basic biographical frame for all further records.

Independent summary License: CC BY-SA Retrieved: 2026-09-16 Wikipedia contributors, "Jimmy DeSana," Wikipedia, The Free Encyclopedia. · AI-assisted summary based on Wikipedia — Jimmy DeSana Read original

Photobooks

1 photobooks

Selected Works & Key Projects

A source-backed introduction to individual photographs and significant bodies of work.

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Key projects

Project · 1972

101 Nudes

DeSana’s first major series, 101 Nudes, originated as an undergraduate project and was issued as a portfolio of photolithographic prints. It comprises images of his friends posed nude in the plain interiors of Atlanta’s postwar houses. The Brooklyn Museum identifies its circulation through mail-art networks and situates it amid the Gay Liberation Movement and local censorship. It merits selection because it establishes the artist’s sustained use of queer domesticity: familiar suburban rooms become a means of looking beneath the social decorum associated with postwar respectability.

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Selected photographs

© Jimmy DeSana

1977

Enema

Enema is a 1977–78 gelatin silver print in DeSana’s Submission series. The Whitney Museum record describes a nude person bridging across a bathtub while water from a showerhead falls over the face. The work merits selection because it gives a precise, institutionally documented example of the series’ transformation of a domestic bathroom into a staged bodily situation. Its compressed setup—body, fixture, water, and an awkward pose—shows why Submission is essential to DeSana’s practice: ordinary interiors and objects become active participants in his photographic construction of sexuality and constraint.

Work source ↗

1980

Untitled

This 1980 silver dye bleach print depicts a nude model wearing a leather handbag over the head and a shoe as a codpiece. The Metropolitan Museum of Art characterizes it as a humorous commentary on fetish as both sexual totem and commodity. It merits selection because it makes unusually direct the logic behind DeSana’s 1979 turn toward lurid color and dramatic lighting: the body is handled as one prop among others. The photograph condenses his recurring collision of sexuality, consumer objects, theatrical staging, and visual comedy into a single deliberately artificial tableau.

Work source ↗
© Jimmy DeSana

1982

Marker Cones

Marker Cones presents DeSana crouched on all fours, viewed from behind, with inverted orange traffic cones covering his hands and feet. ICA Boston describes the resulting figure as headless and built from angular forms; the cones simultaneously suggest stilettos and roadside construction debris. Feverish color and artificial grass intensify the staged, unstable scene. This photograph merits selection as a concentrated demonstration of DeSana’s photo-conceptual method: the body becomes both subject and thing, while gender, fetish, and ordinary manufactured objects are made deliberately difficult to separate.

Work source ↗

Career timeline

8
  1. 1949

    Career milestone

    Born in Detroit, Michigan

    P·P·O·W records Jimmy DeSana as born in Detroit, Michigan, in 1949. This establishes the starting point for an artist whose later practice became closely associated with New York’s downtown art milieu rather than with his birthplace.

    Source: P·P·O·W Verified Sep 16, 2026

  2. 1972

    Education

    Completes studies at Georgia State University

    DeSana received a bachelor’s degree from Georgia State University in Atlanta in 1972, according to P·P·O·W. The same source places his relocation to New York’s East Village in the early 1970s, making graduation the documented transition between his Atlanta education and the New York context central to his subsequent career.

    Source: P·P·O·W Verified Sep 16, 2026

  3. 1972

    Series

    Creates 101 Nudes as a thesis project

    The New Yorker reports that DeSana submitted 101 Nudes as his Georgia State University thesis project in 1972. The project comprises fifty-six small black-and-white photolithographs. Its inclusion at the beginning of the 2022 Brooklyn Museum retrospective marks it as an early, institutionally foregrounded body of work in accounts of his career.

    Source: The New Yorker Verified Sep 16, 2026

  4. 1978

    Exhibition

    Participates in Punk Art Exhibition

    P·P·O·W lists DeSana in Punk Art Exhibition at the Washington Project for the Arts, Washington, DC, in 1978. The appearance documents his public participation in a period exhibition explicitly framed around punk, placing his work within one of the cultural formations that shaped accounts of his downtown-era practice.

    Source: P·P·O·W Verified Sep 16, 2026

  5. 1980

    Photobook

    Publishes Submission

    White Columns identifies Submission as DeSana’s 1980 book, published in New York by Scat Publications. The New York Times describes the book as a publication of photographs of sadomasochistic rituals. Together, these sources document a major early photobook through which DeSana brought sexually explicit staged imagery into a durable published form.

    Source: White Columns Verified Sep 16, 2026

  6. February 15–April 5, 1981

    Exhibition

    Included in New York/New Wave at P.S.1

    MoMA records New York/New Wave at MoMA PS1 from February 15 through April 5, 1981, and identifies DeSana among its artists. MoMA’s historical account characterizes the exhibition as a presentation of 118 artists, writers, and rock musicians that brought downtown energy to Queens and attracted broad art-world and public attention. DeSana’s inclusion situates him in this consequential survey of Lower East Side-associated cultural production.

    Source: The Museum of Modern Art Verified Sep 16, 2026

  7. 1990

    Career milestone

    Dies in New York, New York

    P·P·O·W records DeSana’s life dates as 1949–1990 and lists New York, New York, as his place of death. This endpoint came after a career associated by the gallery with New York’s downtown scene of the 1970s and 1980s.

    Source: P·P·O·W Verified Sep 16, 2026

  8. November 11, 2022–April 16, 2023

    Exhibition

    Jimmy DeSana: Submission at the Brooklyn Museum

    Brooklyn Museum Archives records Jimmy DeSana: Submission as open to the public from November 11, 2022, to April 16, 2023. The exhibition’s documentation is preserved in the museum’s Contemporary Art Department records, including press material, didactics, a checklist, and related correspondence. Its museum presentation is a substantial posthumous institutional milestone in the public record of DeSana’s work.

    Source: Brooklyn Museum Archives Verified Sep 16, 2026

Collections & representation

Representation

P·P·O·W Gallery

New York gallery that represents the Jimmy DeSana estate and has staged solo presentations of his photographs, helping reintroduce his color work to contemporary audiences after his death in 1990.

Verified 2026-09-16P·P·O·W Gallery

Estate

The Jimmy DeSana Trust

The artist's estate, which manages his negatives, prints and archives and authorises posthumous exhibitions, publications and print editions of his work.

Verified 2026-09-16Wikipedia

Collection

Museum of Modern Art

Holds examples of DeSana's photographs in its permanent collection, part of the museum's documented holdings of late twentieth-century American photography.

Verified 2026-09-16Wikipedia

Collection

Whitney Museum of American Art

Collects and has exhibited DeSana's photography, situating his staged colour images within narratives of American art of the 1970s and 1980s.

Verified 2026-09-16Wikipedia

Collection

Brooklyn Museum

Repository of DeSana prints and related material, supporting research and displays that foreground his queer and body-centred imagery.

Verified 2026-09-16Wikipedia

Collection

Solomon R. Guggenheim Museum

Lists DeSana among the photographers represented in its collection, reflecting institutional recognition of his experimental colour practice.

Verified 2026-09-16Wikipedia

Collection

Art Institute of Chicago

Holds DeSana photographs in its collection of modern and contemporary photography, aiding their study outside New York.

Verified 2026-09-16Wikipedia

Gallery relationship

Pat Hearn Gallery

East Village gallery where DeSana exhibited during the 1980s, a venue central to the period's experimental downtown art scene.

Verified 2026-09-16Wikipedia

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