In a 1986 interview with Diego Cortez, Jimmy DeSana remarked on the mutability and transgressive potential of photography: “A photograph is how much you want to lie, how far you want to stretch the truth about the object. And, as photography is always based on real objects, it lends itself, by means of technique or manipulation, to explorations of what may appear to be an absence of reality, balancing on an ambiguous line between concrete and abstract space, between reality and illusion, in a way that no other medium is able to do.“⁠ ⁠ In a series of “portraits” from the mid 1980s, DeSana played with this tension by obscuring and transforming faces through collage and darkroom techniques. His movement into abstraction—in works that nonetheless address his experience living with HIV/AIDS—was in part a reaction to dilemmas over representations of sexuality and queer bodies during the first decade of the AIDS epidemic, from media bias to conservative censorship to activist demands. Critics recognized DeSana’s masquerades and darkroom experiments in color as tributes to Surrealist photography of the 1920s and 1930s, which still had the power to confound expectations around photography and realism. #JimmyDeSanaBkM⁠ ⁠ 📷 Jimmy DeSana (American, 1949–1990). Untitled (Man with Antler), 1985. Silver dye bleach print, 13 1/4 × 10 1/4 in. (33.7 × 26 cm). Courtesy of the Jimmy DeSana Trust and P·P·O·W Gallery, New York. © Estate of Jimmy DeSana. (Photo: Allen Phillips)