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In his forward to the room brochure accompanying ‘Bill Henson: 3 Decades of Photography’, National Gallery of Victoria (NGV) Director Gerard Vaughan writes: ‘What becomes clearly evident in this remarkable installation is the full extent of Henson’s powerful and distinctive vision’.1 Highlighting the unique vision of the artist is an objective familiar to many retrospectives, but in its enthusiastic promotion of his ‘powerful and distinctive vision’, ‘3 Decades’ places Henson in the rather old-fashioned role of modernist ‘master’. In photography, this position has been interpreted historically as that of a technical virtuoso, the creator of discreet photographic objects—an artist for whom the fine print is the primary vehicle for their formalist vision. And, in many ways, Henson fits this role. His attention to the quality of the print and his technical inventiveness has seen his work frequently compared to a painterly canon—there are echoes of Degas, Rembrandt, Caravaggio throughout his work—and the refusal implicit in his consistent use of ‘untitled’ as a mode of titling aligns his work with a modernist avant-garde that privileges the autonomy, and often the silence, of the artwork.2
But this does not fully account for the complexity of Henson’s work, which is as much influenced by The Virgin Suicides and Martin Scorsese as it is by any modernist formalism. His photographs muse on the lived urban, or suburban, experience and the position of the individual within it. A political debate also swirls uncomfortably around the edges of Henson’s work, concerning the morality—or amorality—of his representation of adolescent subjects, who are variously depicted as naked, dirty, distressed, or in the throes of a torrid sexual encounter.
It is this tension between the undeniable beauty... The rest of this article is available to subscribers of Eyeline