Bill Henson

Overview

Bill Henson is a prolific Australian photographer who takes as his primary subject adolescents to investigate identity, notions of self, tradition and ideas of socio-cultural voyeurism. It is because of Henson's subject matter that his work has been at the centre of heated debate in recent photographic history. In 2008, some of Henson's photographs were removed from Sydney galleries following a police raid after allegations his work was not art, but child pornography. Three weeks later the photographs were returned.

For a photographer whose work isn't founded on a strict political agenda, Henson's photographs come with a loaded political history. His latest show at Roslyn Oxley9 is his first exhibition in Sydney in two years and will no doubt be received with mixed reaction. There will be those who seek out some form of justification wherein believers of child pornography claims attempt to reassure their attitudes towards Henson's 'misuse' of minors and there will be art appreciators who will praise the artist's creative and technical merit. There will also be those who beg the question: when we will just let it be?

This exhibition features a series of all new photographs created in a range of formats, including rectangular and oval images for the first time, of both figurative and landscape subject matter. One of the more striking in this series is an image of a young female adolescent, naked, crouched with her downward gaze positioned to the right. With scars on her visible knee and bruised skin, we ask for reason to believe she hasn't just been the victim of violent misadventure. Conditioned by an acute contrast of light and dark where shadows confirm limited depth, the girl's body becomes representational of withheld information. Where is she? What has she been doing and what next?

Tuning in on this idea of inoperative information in a recent statement, Henson offered, "Sometimes I think that every picture is simply a fragment from some larger image, the precise nature of which I cannot see, and that this image will never arrive at completion. Of course, the thing which most interests you is that sensing of an image which is always disappearing around the bend in front of you. Something that is powerfully apprehended but not fully understood."

Another in Henson's latest body of work, is also just as disturbing. We witness a young male slouched, head leaning on arm, with his right leg folding into the photograph's foreground. With ephemeral light shedding onto the boy's wet hair, and with his eyes seemingly sedated, we question his state of consciousness. He, in an intensely interior and undecipherable environment, represents our inability to remove him from his seemingly frightening reality. The adolescent has been arrested by the space that surrounds him.

"The manner in which we sense temperature, gravity, velocity, humidity and the profound effect these and other forces have upon our conscious and unconscious body, have always been at the centre of creative endeavour," said Henson.

Henson's latest work doesn't try to be beautiful, it tries to be true. The artist's images are paralysing because the adolescents in them offer an intense conditioning of humanity. The subjects of Henson's photographs are clearly displaced, they are lost and searching for something beyond our current time and place. Beneath the photographic surface there lies a striking emptiness and hollow spiritual hope as the haunting bodies in front of us quality a dark reality. There is a loss of innocence both within Henson's work and outside it, as audiences recognise a twisted eurphoria. Henson's work is simple with a tremendous resonance.