In the second half of the 1970s, Jimmy DeSana chronicled and helped canonize early aspects of what would become known as the New Wave and No Wave scenes in New York and beyond. ⁠ ⁠ He coedited the Fall 1977 issue of File magazine with his friends Diego Cortez and Anya Phillips. Together with the Toronto-based collective General Idea, who published the artist magazine, they evoked and poked fun at the do-it-yourself aesthetic of punk through their writing, photographs, and graphic design.⁠ ⁠ DeSana produced many of the photographs that appear in the issue, including portraits of musical acts Blondie, Richard Hell, Mars, the Talking Heads, and Teenage Jesus and the Jerks. Rather than attempting to capture likenesses, DeSana intentionally obscured or transformed his sitters’ appearances through lighting and exaggerated posing. Like emerging cultural theories at the time, DeSana’s photographs called attention to the artificiality of the image and the performance of identity. #JimmyDeSanaBkM⁠ ⁠ 📷 General Idea, FILE Megazine, Vol. 3 No. 4, Fall 1977. Courtesy of Philip Aarons and Shelley Fox Aarons. © Reprinted with permission of General Idea. (Photo: David Vu)