A common reflection on Bill Henson’s work is that it attempts to capture moments in transition of the subject matters depicted such as between, childhood and adulthood or night and day.
The recent excellent In Conversation with Bill Henson, moderated by Paul Grabowsky, before a packed house at the Samstag Auditorium at UniSA, perhaps gives us an opportunity to modify that view. For it seems, Henson is a romantic for the past and deeply nostalgic about the world that existed in his youth.
Raised on what was then the south eastern city-rural edge of Melbourne in the 1950s, Henson calls the destruction of his child hood landscapes a ‘part of the violence in society’ lamenting that we are suffering from a ‘narrowing of the cultural vision’ and proving very prone to fashion, sustaining only ‘a tenuous grasp on the continent.’
What concerns Henson, he says, is ‘compression’ – the fewer steps between pure black and white – which manifests itself not only in the use of technology (including in his chosen career in photography) but also public debate where dealing with ambiguity is diminishing rapidly.
This he says represents a disappearance of sophistication and the rise of a form of fundamentalism – the inability to contemplate and consider other points of view.
As for its causes, Henson points the finger at ‘less and less stillness and the silence needed for contemplation.’
On his relationship with his camera, Henson spoke of the suspense of using film (which he still does.) He says it is like shooting arrows in the dark, the business of chance that brings uncertainty and anxiety that carries over into the dark room when searching for the ‘awesome, tender and the infinite.’
In his images, Henson says he is looking for something ‘unreasonable’ about the place of the image in the space that surrounds it, a sort of ‘cultural vertigo – that sense of the unlikelihood of the outcome’.
He seeks to create a space for the imagination to function, for contemplation and also a sense of loss or longing in the disappearance of something – the parts that go missing in the shadows.
From this comes the thought that what sits at the core of Henson’s images is nostalgia – representations of the past as he would like them to be (and for us to believe them to have been) but which were never really exactly like that at all – those areas of ambiguity between reality and the dream being shrouded in darkness.
These images also sit suspended between those idealised states and the harshness, even the violence, of the next stage of the process to come – the future that is never quite as good as it was hoped it would be.
Bill Henson: early work from the MGA collection, with selected recent landscapes continues at the Samstag til 16 December. See our review at The Samstag\’s Bill Henson Exhibition Review
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