Mnemosyne

An old master working in a new medium, Bill Henson's photographs are so rich with texture that in writing about his work one has to seek out new descriptive correlatives in order to effectively evoke the choking effect these images possess. Then again, perhaps the difficulty is rooted in the fact that Henson himself has always worked hand-in-hand with the literary, etching out a poetry of images in bodies of work that form alternate narratives when viewed as a series—the type of narratives usually found in dreams. Mnemosyne—the goddess of memory, mother of the muses—is the title of a recent monograph; an apt one for this paginated retrospective of Henson, who has always been an artist's artist rather than a mere snapper of the “found”. It is a huge, hulking, beautiful monster of a book that catalogues Henson's most vital work from the 70s up to the present, and includes several rare essays on various phases of the work by poets and critics such as John Forbes, David Malouf, Dennis Cooper, Michael Heyward, and Peter Schjeldahl. In terms of technique, what Henson manages to pull off with a camera and the subsequent print is unbelievable. Henson's painterly precision came to the forefront early on in a series of young dancers warming up in a dim studio flooded with natural light. They could have been painted by Hopper, with their foggy air of timelessness, if it weren't for the fact that Henson's subjects were real—soulful bags of flesh captured by a haunted lens. He moved into black-and-white, began exploring the realm of adolescent sexuality in a series of portraits of an emaciated pubescent boy nude, possibly masturbating, or at least writhing around on a thin strip of carpet in an erotic anguish which is the anguish of being.

The disparity between public and private is a theme Henson began exploring early on. It's a point of tension whose manifestations were extreme, from the youth portraits to the famous black-and-white series of crowd shots. In the latter, Henson turned his focus towards the streets of his native Melbourne, although they could really be the streets of any large city, then tore many of the prints up in order to focus on particular bodies, expressions, potential scenarios—the individuals in the crowd. While these images from the late 70s occupy a significant bulk of the volume, fair attention is paid to the color works that have gained Henson some notoriety in recent years, namely the scenes of dirty, nude adolescents engaged in mysterious, feral games, often in abandoned-looking spaces. These kids are beautiful, but not in any conventional sense, and while a lot of them look like junkies, there's no Calvin Klein around to glamorize their vices, no Larry Clark to jerk off over their vulnerabilities. Instead, Henson chooses to juxtapose these subjects with shots of the sky, inferring a cosmic relationship between the two.

The most extravagant work reproduced in Mnemosyne is undoubtedly the “cut-screen” photographs, which typically showcase one central image collaged with pieces of other images, whose association with the main subject matter is often vague or abstract. It may be “cut up” in method, but the overall effect is baroque, with the tumbling bodies, bits of sky, and angry city lights synthetically coalescing into one grand allegorical whole—one that purports to narrate the story of creation while acknowledging the penultimate majesty, the everlasting challenge of omniscient darkness.