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APERTURE/SALON 94
Jimmy DeSana: Suburban
Edited by Dan Nadel, Laurie Simmons. Text by Elisabeth Sussman, Laurie Simmons.
Jimmy DeSana: Suburban collects in print for the first time DeSana's surreally lyrical, sexually charged photographs from his series of the same name, made in the late 1970s through the 1980s. DeSana staged photos of nude subjects, male and female, in various strange, evocative poses, entwined with everyday objects and luridly lit with gel-covered tungsten lights. The photographs suggest broad physical comedy as much as sadomasochism. "I don't really think of that work as erotic," DeSana has said of this series. "I think of the body almost as an object. I attempted to use the body but without the eroticism that some photographers use frequently. I think I de-eroticized a lot of it … but that is the way the suburbs are in a sense." At a moment of growing interest in DeSana's life and work, this volume (edited by Dan Nadel and DeSana's longtime roommate and friend Laurie Simmons) offers access to a critical--and previously unpublished--early body of the photographer's work. Jimmy DeSana (1949-90) is known for his portraits of the larger-than-life stars of the 1970s and 1980s downtown New York art and music scenes such as Debbie Harry, David Byrne and Laurie Anderson as well as for his staged photographs of the human body. Part of a generation of artists that introduced photography to the New York art scene in the 1980s, DeSana was active up to his death, at age 40, of an AIDS-related illness.
Featured image is reproduced from Jimmy DeSana: Suburban.
"Looking at these photographs, the viewer is struck by their lack of cliché and their power to evoke a period that we now regard with nostalgia," Elisabeth Sussman writes in Jimmy DeSana: Suburban. "Bathed in the saturated tones of nightlife, DeSana's images deny the romanticism we could project on this period, now the subject of film and television—the good time of sex, discos, clubs, glamour. With considerable finesse and humor, the pictures capture the uneasy boundary between fun and terror, liberation and fear." continue to blog
"These photographs could have been taken in a club but were not," Elizabeth Sussman writes in Aperture's phenomenal Jimmy De Sana: Suburban. "This is private, domestic space—generically, the interior spaces of any suburb: bathroom, kitchen, living room, garage. Danger, near-death moments, erotic highs are all close to home, sometimes in the form of do-it-yourself violence: the gas from the car can asphyxiate you; the gas from the stove can amplify a colossal balloon attached to a penis. Collectively, in these images the focus, front and center, is the body. DeSana never deviates from an emphasis on the body and the full spectrum of pain to pleasure. He is a theatrical producer on a small scale, a miniaturist of anxiety, eroticism and humor." Sussman will appear on a DeSana panel with Paula Greif, Laurie Simmons and William J. Simmons, moderated by Dan Nadel, Tuesday, November 3 at Aperture Foundation. continue to blog
"It was from Jimmy that I learned to feel that the camera was an extension of my right hand," photographer Laurie Simmons writes in Jimmy De Sana: Suburban, this year's big staff favorite, just out from Aperture. "I could see that his fingertips were itchy if he was not holding one of his two Nikons. The camera was at the ready every waking, and even sleeping, moment of his day. Jimmy bridged two distinct photo worlds: even though his pictures were meticulously staged and crafted, he also knew that something spontaneous could change the course of his work for that day, that year, or forever." Featured image is "Pool," 1980. continue to blog
Published by Aperture/Salon 94. Edited by Dan Nadel, Laurie Simmons. Text by Elisabeth Sussman, Laurie Simmons.
Jimmy DeSana: Suburban collects in print for the first time DeSana's surreally lyrical, sexually charged photographs from his series of the same name, made in the late 1970s through the 1980s. DeSana staged photos of nude subjects, male and female, in various strange, evocative poses, entwined with everyday objects and luridly lit with gel-covered tungsten lights. The photographs suggest broad physical comedy as much as sadomasochism.
"I don't really think of that work as erotic," DeSana has said of this series. "I think of the body almost as an object. I attempted to use the body but without the eroticism that some photographers use frequently. I think I de-eroticized a lot of it … but that is the way the suburbs are in a sense." At a moment of growing interest in DeSana's life and work, this volume (edited by Dan Nadel and DeSana's longtime roommate and friend Laurie Simmons) offers access to a critical--and previously unpublished--early body of the photographer's work.
Jimmy DeSana (1949-90) is known for his portraits of the larger-than-life stars of the 1970s and 1980s downtown New York art and music scenes such as Debbie Harry, David Byrne and Laurie Anderson as well as for his staged photographs of the human body. Part of a generation of artists that introduced photography to the New York art scene in the 1980s, DeSana was active up to his death, at age 40, of an AIDS-related illness.
