JTF (just the facts): A total of 56 black-and-white photographs, framed in light brown and unmatted, and hung against white walls in the back gallery space and the stairwell. All of the works are offset prints, made in 1991, each sized 11×14 inches (or the reverse). The portfolio was originally self published in 1972 and reprinted by A.R.T. Press in 1991 in an edition of 50 copies. (Installation shots below.)
Comments/Context: When we dig way back into an artist’s career and look closely at his or her student, university, or thesis work, we tend to be doing so to establish beginnings, to chart progressions, or to unearth clues to what came later. And in general, we tend to be forgiving of this early work, knowing that it is often experimental, ephemeral, or made for class assignments, with the technical aspects of the medium not entirely yet mastered. In some cases, we wrap this work in the genre of “juvenilia” to signal that we do actually understand that it was made before the artist reached his or her more mature style. But for some artists, whose voice and point of view seem to emerge with unexpected clarity early on, these first works can feel fresh and alive in ways that later more polished efforts can struggle to match in terms of rawness, simplicity, and authenticity.
This show reaches back to Jimmy DeSana’s early 20s, and the senior thesis project he made at Georgia State University in Atlanta in 1972. Titled “101 Nudes”, it’s actually a portfolio of 56 black-and-white nude photographs of himself and his friends posed in various domestic settings, inside and outside suburban homes (the title is a playful riff on “101 Dalmatians”.) In DeSana’s excellent 2023 retrospective at the Brooklyn Museum (reviewed here), “101 Nudes” was shown as a wall-filling grid nestled in amongst a busy gathering of other early work; here the series is given much more room to breathe, sliding down the walls in single file and wrapping around the gallery space and back into a nearby stairwell, encouraging us to see the images individually and in sequence, rather than all at once as a single impression.
While DeSana is in no way the first or only art student to ever use his own nude body as a subject, at the time of its making, “101 Nudes” created some aesthetic frictions that we hadn’t really seen before. What interested DeSana was the seemingly wholesome culture of the American middle class suburbs, and the bland (and often stifling) conformity it represented in both its architecture and its behaviors. He then took this familiar setting and boldly interrupted it with performative nude figures, creating a strangely dissonant (and almost conceptual) setup, where nude people casually wander through forgettable domestic rooms, playing and posing with a sense of behind-the-curtains exhibitionist provocation. In many ways, it was an active personal reaction to the distortions and claustrophobias of the 1970s suburban environment, encouraging impulses and urges to more openly inhabit the dull everyday spaces.
What immediately sticks out about these early DeSana nudes is their casual, blunt aesthetic. The handheld black-and-white images often feel like snapshots, or at least improvised moments, where figures interact with their surroundings with loose, seemingly unrehearsed collaborative energy. Most of the images are washed with frontal flash-lit brightness and dynamic immediacy, DeSana often blasting the details and contrasts out to the point of harshly flared white indistinctness, with dark shadows running off to the sides. In a few cases, DeSana has gotten up close enough to turn cropped bodies into near abstractions, but for the most part, these nude bodies are seen in relationship to their humble suburban surroundings.
Some have linked this grainy overexposed vibe to the look of 1950s era pornography, and while DeSana may have consciously appropriated some of that style, his pictures deliberately have very little heat or mannered eroticism. Instead, both male and female figures consistently pose informally, interacting with the settings with participatory ease, even when the poses become more playfully theatrical or quizzically odd. These aren’t sexy nudes particularly; they are staged moments in private lives, the usual (or expected) charged desire of such voyeuristic encounters subversively stripped away to leave something altogether more modest and self-deprecating behind. And it is this upending (or diluting) of our expectations that makes these nudes so wonderfully matter-of-fact and strangely memorable.
The entire concept of the “suburban nude” is cleverly mundane, especially when DeSana infuses it with flashes of absurdity and understated comedy. The most deadpan of his images are often the most successful, because they lean into the puzzling blandness of the whole exercise. Nude men and women sit blankly on sofas and upholstered chairs, stand near curtains and window blinds, and linger near countless other domestic furnishings, like display cases, door frames, potted plants, and a piano, each scene somehow drained of any notable provocation, even when breasts, butts, genitals, public hair, and other body parts are more prominently featured.
As the images pile up, more overt posing and cinematic artfulness certainly takes place, but the overall mood is never particularly formal. Simple props like a puffy wig, an apron, some high heels, a fur coat, and a cigarette all make eclectic appearances, as do multiple images of a nude woman posing with a shaggy dog and another draped in sheer fabric. And as a young photographer liberally experimenting with compositional options, DeSana offers a range of trial and error examples: figures stretching telephone cords, a woman behind a beaded curtain, another with clumps of bushy hydrangeas, a male nude interacting with a Jesus mural, a woman watching herself in the mirror of a vanity, a man standing on a dining table, a woman dramatically extending her hands to block his gaze, and a male nude making the same pose as a nearby figurine. In aggregate, DeSana crafts an interior world that is at once nonchalant and campy, where friends lounge around and playfully vamp when appropriately prompted.
In the enveloping (and perhaps concealing) darkness of the night, DeSana and his friends then venture outside, posing naked in the yard, the bold contrasts of light and dark in the resulting photographs exaggerated even further. Garden scenes capture bodies in amongst the trees and leafy greenery, or lounging in the tall overgrown grass. Other images feature nudes staged in front of the house, on the stairs, leaning against railings and bannisters, and near a parked car, the setups both mundanely unaffected and clearly arranged. In these pictures, the private activities that were taking place indoors have now spilled out into a somewhat more public area, making the potential deviances and transgressions from the norms of suburbia that much more visible.
Back inside, DeSana also intermittently experiments with tighter abstractions, isolating figures, sides, torsos, butts, and other less identifiable body parts, catching them from unexpected angles, and washing them out into ghostly whiteness. While a couple of these might plausibly called intentional nude distortions, for the most part, DeSana stays inside the lines of identifiability, looking for formal curves, lines, contrasts, and juxtapositions with nearby objects (including the edge of a bathroom sink in one memorable case) that he can use to energize (or deconstruct) a composition. The best of these feel like flashed out glimpses, like a figure passing too close to stay in focus or a nude body slipping past without fully registering.
While DeSana would go on to make plenty of innovative and risk-taking nudes in the next few decades, particularly in color, there is something quietly radical about this early project that remains engaging. At the time, few photographers were using the commonplace surroundings of the residential suburbs to host an undercover rebellion like this one, where the nude body has been used to hijack our assumptions about suburban life. DeSana’s intentional manipulation of a casual aesthetic was similarly sophisticated for such a young photographer; making throw away snapshots of young bodies is relatively easy, but appropriating a blown out flash lit eye to incisively wrestle with prevailing cultural norms is altogether trickier. In this way, “101 Nudes” is both easy to like and deceptively thought-provoking, entertaining us with its deadpan irreverence and challenging us to see how the the classical nude form could be artistically leveraged in a new direction.
Collector’s POV: The prints in this show are available as a complete portfolio (the 1991 edition) priced at $12000, or as individual prints priced at $450, $600, or $750 each. DeSana’s work has very little secondary market history, with only a handful of lots coming to market in the past decade or so. As such, gallery retail likely remains the best option for those collectors interested in following up.
