In the second half of the 1970s, Jimmy DeSana became an important portraitist of figures associated with downtown New York’s No Wave scene, such as the writer and dominatrix Terence Sellers. 

DeSana often riffed on classic publicity photography from the so-called golden age of Hollywood, with dramatic poses and theatrical lighting. This celebrity-making mode dovetailed with the “ironic aesthetic strategies” of this group of artists, which the music critic Robert Christgau identified, in his 1977 article “Avant-Punk: A Cult Explodes—and a Movement Is Born,” identified as “formal rigidity, role-playing, and humor.”

The year they made this portrait, DeSana and Sellers began collaborating on a series of photographs, which documented the dominatrix with her clients and were intended to illustrate her book The Correct Sadist: The Memoirs of Angel Stern—a kind of etiquette manual for sadomasochistic practices, as told in the voice of Sellers’s alter ego.  

📷 Jimmy DeSana (American, 1949–1990). Terence Sellers, 1978. Gelatin silver print, 9 5/8 × 6 ½ in. (24.4 × 16.5 cm). Courtesy of the Jimmy DeSana Trust and P·P·O·W Gallery, New York. © Estate of Jimmy DeSana. (Photo: Allen Phillips)