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Körper in den Fotografien Jimmy DeSanas

Abstract

This article examines the photographs of artist Jimmy DeSana, who documented New York subcultures in the 1970s and experimented with materials and color in the 1980s. DeSana’s photographic interest in fetish cultures will be contextualized in the philosophical discourse of the 1970s, in which transgressive sexual practices were used to reveal and subvert power structures. To this end, I will locate the visual politics of the photographs in their publishing contexts: the magazine Semiotext(e), edited by philosopher Sylvère Lotringer, and FILE Megazine, edited by the artist group General Idea. Both magazines queered with their visual politics the strategies that determined the representation of subjects. I argue that DeSana’s material stagings and photographic processes intertwine bodies, their surfaces, and the surrounding space in order to reflect on image rhetorics and subject formations of mass media and create an alternative in which to image other ways of being and relating.