Jimmy DeSana: Meyer Riegger, Berlin

A year after graduating, in 1973, DeSana moved to New York. He began sending his photographs to members of the mail art network, and the following year the Canadian collective General Idea (AA Bronson, Georg Partz and Jorge Zontal) featured DeSana’s photographs in their magazine FILE, which would go on to play a central role in the publication of DeSana’s work.

Alongside his freelance activities in New York, DeSana also undertook commissions for album covers (such as Talking Heads’ More Songs about Buildings and Food, 1978); he took photographs for magazines and newspapers and later made portraits of artists such as Laurie Simmons, Debbie Harry and Anya Phillips, one of the founders of the legendary Mudd Club. The other major series of his oeuvre were all created in the city: The Dungeon (1978–79), Submission (1977–79) and Suburban (1979–84).

The Dungeon pictures were made in collaboration with writer and dominatrix Terence Sellers, outside on beaches or caught in the beam of a single light in her apartment. The photos capture Sellers and her clients before, during and after various tortures. There are leather and latex gloves, masks, and other kinky equipment.

While DeSana and Sellers worked collaboratively – Desana controlling the lighting and angle; Sellers overseeing the styling of herself and her client – their aims were different. For DeSana, these shoots used tropes of Americana to continue his inquiry into the characteristics of queer subcultures that he began with 101 Nudes. For Sellers, DeSana’s images were meant to be visual accompaniments to chapters of her then-in-progress manuscript The Correct Sadist: The Memoirs of Angel Stern, a quasi-manual for sadomasochistic practices.

In 1980, DeSana published Submission, a volume of 29 photographs illustrating sadomasochistic sex practices. Together with Robert Mapplethorpe, DeSana thus brought depictions of gay sex into the public sphere. In the preface to the publication, in which DeSana gathered these often humorous photographs of S&M performances in domestic settings, author and member of the Beat Generation William S. Burroughs wrote:

“The very word submission contains the paradox of wanting and not wanting. And this ambivalent position can only be maintained by a double ignorance: not knowing what one wants to do and not knowing what one does not want to do. Can this ignorance survive the impersonal click of the camera? Can such a paradox exist in an age of total confrontation?”

DeSana’s photographs explore this paradox, playing with the tension between wanting and not wanting, between subject and object.

Immediately after Submission, DeSana began Suburban, a series that continued his exploration of domestic environments featuring naked people, but now in lurid colours rather than black and white.

DeSana used artificial light and colour filters for these works and photographed the subjects’ bodies from strange angles and in twisted poses. Apart from his portraits, DeSana did not name his photographs after the naked models, but after the objects on or with which they assume their unusual poses.

After DeSana received his AIDS diagnosis in 1985 and became progressively weaker, he restricted his subject matter but continued to work obsessively: he now focused on almost abstract images, sometimes also of objects such as candlesticks, as well as human faces.

As curator Elisabeth Sussman observed in her essay “Jimmy DeSana: Erotic Miniaturist” (Jimmy DeSana: Suburban, 2015, Aperture), the 1970s were the last decade in which erotic hedonism was not associated with the danger of infection – an unknowledge that signified great freedom for the Queer scene, a scene that was also constantly being challenged or even made impossible by social exclusion and hostilities, up to and including violent police attacks, a threat faced by gay men like DeSana at the time. DeSana’s oeuvre is an aesthetically captivating negotiation of the subversive power of the Queer body between the poles of freedom and restriction, life and death.