Jimmy DeSana’s reputation might have died when his life ended, in 1990, as a result of aids. He was only forty years old. The New York-based photographer was busy, prolific, and popular during his lifetime—he was included in the buzzy exhibitions “The Times Square Show” and “New York/New Wave,” in the early eighties—but, in hindsight, he seemed stranded at the edge of the scene. A new retrospective at the Brooklyn Museum, “Jimmy DeSana: Submission” (through April 16), makes a strong case for his ongoing relevance. From the beginning, DeSana’s work was erotic, compulsive, gender fluid, and all the more unsettling for its comic flashes. The show opens with a wall-filling grid of fifty-six voyeuristic, black-and-white pictures from 1972—student work, made in imitation of amateur porn and flea-market snapshots. Nearby hang later examples of DeSana’s stylized portraiture, featuring the likes of William S. Burroughs, Billy Idol, and Laurie Anderson. A portrait of Debbie Harry, laughing in sunglasses, appeared on the cover of the influential underground magazine File, under the headline “Punk ’Til You Puke.” At a moment when the counterculture had come to define the culture, DeSana played a key role, turning rising stars into hipster pinups. He also dabbled in S & M, portraying unlikely collisions of bodies and objects, all luridly lit: a red high heel trapped under pantyhose, a suspended figure with his head in a foaming toilet bowl, a screaming mouth full of cocktail toothpicks (“Party Picks,” from 1981, above). The effect is a cross between David Cronenberg’s body horror and Guy Bourdin’s fashionable fetishism. At once laughable and alarming, playful and lethal, DeSana’s work still lands like a psychological time bomb.

— Vince Aletti