Jimmy De Sana was an American

United States

The United States of America is a federal constitutional republic comprising fifty states and a federal district...

 artist

Artist

An artist is a person engaged in one or more of any of a broad spectrum of activities related to creating art, practicing the arts and/or demonstrating an art. The common usage in both everyday speech and academic discourse is a practitioner in the visual arts only...

, and a key figure in the East Village punk art scene of the 1970s and 1980s. His photography has been described as "anti-art

Anti-art

Anti-art is a loosely-used term applied to an array of concepts and attitudes that reject prior definitions of art and question art in general. Anti-art tends to conduct this questioning and rejection from the vantage point of art...

" in its approach to capturing images of the human body, in a manner ranging from "savagely explicit to purely symbolic"., William S. Burroughs

William S. Burroughs

William Seward Burroughs II was an American novelist, poet, essayist and spoken word performer. A primary figure of the Beat Generation and a major postmodernist author, he is considered to be "one of the most politically trenchant, culturally influential, and innovative artists of the 20th...

wrote the introduction to his collection of photographs Submission which was self-published in 1980.

Further reading

• De Sana, Jimmy, Laurie Simmons, Roberta Smith, and William S. Bartman. Jimmy DeSana Los Angeles: A.R.T. Press, 1990. ISBN 09231830305

• Grundberg, Andy, Jerry Saltz, and Jimmy De Sana. Abstraction in Contemporary Photography. Richmond: Anderson Gallery, 1989.

• Hainley, Bruce. "Jimmy De Sana." Artforum International. 34(1995): 90-1.
• Punk Art online version of catalogue for a 1978 exhibition at the Washington Project for the Arts, Washington DC.