Salvation

A meditation on loss, death, and nothingness, Salvation is the final artist's book of East Village photographer Jimmy De Sana (1949-1990), conceived as he was dying of AIDS-related illness and published for the first time in 2024 by Primary Information, more than three decades after his death.

The book presents 44 of De Sana's late photographic abstractions: relics, body parts, flowers, and fruit transformed through collage and darkroom manipulation into images at once intimate and otherworldly. Variations of many of the works first appeared in his last exhibition at Pat Hearn Gallery in 1988 shortly afterward he began assembling a maquette for the book, using black-and-white images as placeholders for the color works he intended for the final layout. On his deathbed he dictated completion instructions to his longtime friend, the artist Laurie Simmons, whose studio matched extant slides to his sequence and selected color gels from his archive to realize each image. The result is a quiet, sophisticated counterpoint to the bold political statements that dominated art made in response to the HIV/AIDS crisis.

De Sana was a central figure of New York's downtown scene of the 1970s and 80s, moving through mail art, punk, and No Wave circles and producing a body of photography known for saturated color, concealed figures, and surreal stagings of suburbia and queer fetish subculture, most famously in Submission (1980), made with writer Terence Sellers with an introduction by William S. Burroughs. His estate, overseen by Simmons and represented by P·P·O·W, New York, was the subject of the retrospective Jimmy DeSana: Submission at the Brooklyn Museum in 2022-23.