Jimmy De Sana


Jimmy DeSana was an American artist, and a key figure in the East Village punk art scene of the 1970s and 1980s. 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"., William S. Burroughs wrote the introduction to his collection of photographs Submission which was self-published in 1980. His work includes the album cover for the Talking Heads album More Songs about Buildings and Food.

Biography

DeSana was born in Detroit in 1950, but grew up in Atlanta. He began to take photographs being a teen, mostly photographing his friends and acquaintances naked. His early photographs were of his friends striking silly and sexy poses in houses and gardens. He moved to New York in 1973. DeSana continued to picture the human body as the primary subject. He worked in black and white till 1980, when he began to experiment with color photography.
DeSana died in 1990 from AIDS related illness.
He had numerous solo exhibitions, including those in Wilkinson Gallery, London; Pat Hearn Gallery, New York; Galerie Jacques de Windt, Brussels and Museum of the Twentieth Century, Vienna, Austria