By Travis Diehl, February 10, 2025
Jimmy DeSana’s series “101 Nudes” contains 56 black and white photographs. The title apparently references the Disneyfied wholesomeness of the animated film 101 Dalmatians and evokes the freshness of an introductory course. The portfolio was DeSana’s senior thesis project at Georgia State University in 1972 (although the prints on view are offset from 1991). Each image presents one or two men or women from a small cast—usually completely, bluntly nude. The nudity, rather than erotic, seems like a self-imposed constraint. The photos are coy, largely set in residential rooms and gardens that give detailed atmosphere without saying too much about where, who, or even when the subjects are. This private style of exhibitionism gives the series the feeling of documenting a commune, as if DeSana and his troupe spent their days thinking up new ways to style one of photography’s oldest tropes.
Jimmy DeSana’s series “101 Nudes” contains 56 black and white photographs. The title apparently references the Disneyfied wholesomeness of the animated film 101 Dalmatians and evokes the freshness of an introductory course. The portfolio was DeSana’s senior thesis project at Georgia State University in 1972 (although the prints on view are offset from 1991). Each image presents one or two men or women from a small cast—usually completely, bluntly nude. The nudity, rather than erotic, seems like a self-imposed constraint. The photos are coy, largely set in residential rooms and gardens that give detailed atmosphere without saying too much about where, who, or even when the subjects are. This private style of exhibitionism gives the series the feeling of documenting a commune, as if DeSana and his troupe spent their days thinking up new ways to style one of photography’s oldest tropes.
There are exterior shots, too, taken under cover of darkness. Here the models’ skin is blown out against inky night. Several pictures place the curved shapes of cropped-in bodies among bushy hydrangeas, leafy branches, and tall grass, to prelapsarian effect. One image catches a white form moving past a vintage hatchback. Again, the nudity is less remarkable than the setting, which hovers between bare and safe. The figures are naked, outside, yet cloaked with darkness, and yet again exposed by the camera and flash. In one photo a woman lounges on the front steps of a house with her feet on the banister, and another composition—the widest shot in the bunch—shows possibly the same house, same steps, and a woman contrapposto on the stoop, almost lost in a band of shadow between the white house and blown-out overgrown yard. DeSana’s series pushes how a model can be both nude and concealed.
Abstraction offers another strategy. Several images are taken so close that they render their subjects as white blurs and black clefts, with details like the sketchy rim of a bathroom sink or a dog and stacked LPs for context. DeSana likes to unsettle the compositions with objects in the foreground, blasted to white, such as a shot of the beforementioned brunette in a chair touching his mouth in a way that echoes the pose of a silhouetted figurine next to him. Several photos drape the nudes’ flesh with sheer cloth—a classical strategy mirrored, with more reverence than profanity, in a striking shot of a disrobed young man pressing against a mural of berobed Jesus. DeSana seems to know that his series borrows both from antique traditions and pulp sexploitation—“the nude” weighs down the nudity, while louche diversion keeps fine art human. One photo shows a wider view of the mural, depicting Jesus blessing a woman in a landscape of cypress trees and Levantine hills. The nude here is unusually subtle: just peeking in from the rightmost edge, a penis.
Travis Diehl is a critic, writer and editor and is a recipient of the Andy Warhol Foundation Arts Writers Grant and the Rabkin Prize in Visual Arts Journalism.
JIMMY DESANA,
JIMMY DESANA,
JIMMY DESANA,
JIMMY DESANA,
JIMMY DESANA,
JIMMY DESANA,