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Bill Henson's photographs in his recent show at the Roslyn Oxley9 Gallery revisit what is now familiar signature territory for him- a twilight world of deserted suburbs and industrial wastelands and, most recognisable perhaps, a nocturnal landscape of forests and woodlands populated by wrecked cars and naked adolescents. However, in these Type C colour photographs (displayed in two parallel rows) Henson moves away from the large 'cut-screen' composites (exhibited at the 46th Venice Biennale five years ago) that employed the techniques of cubist assemblage and collage and which themselves looked like torn and damaged remnants from the aftermath of some violent or catastrophic event. Instead, the scale of the recent prints is not only reduced but their physical integrity remains intact. So too, in contrast to the baroque complexities and dynamism of the larger pieces, Henson's focus in these works is upon single or paired figures who at times adopt self-consciously classical poses (for example, the slight contrapposto of the young man in #20). Yet if these photographs have a greater sense of intimacy and compositional restraint, the potentially overblown rhetoric characteristic of much of Henson's work remains, while its familiarity, both of iconography and style, makes apparent Henson's at times excessive reliance on semantic shortcuts.
Throughout his work, Henson has drawn heavily upon photography's affective connotations of absence and loss which he has harnessed to a high Romantic, even decadent, sensibility-one that in turn recalls Walter Benjamin's description (in The Origin of German Tragic Theatre) of the melancholic temperament of allegory that 'revives the emptied world so as to take a mysterious pleasure in its sight' and in which 'history lies beneath the eyes of the viewer as a