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Bill Henson at Robert Miller
Art in America, Dec, 2004 by Jean Dykstra
Bill Henson is one of the best known and most widely exhibited artists in Australia. He was that nation's representative at the 1995 Venice Biennale, and his gallery in Sydney is Roslyn Oxley9, which also shows the work of fellow Australian photographer Tracey Moffatt. Moffatt, however, has achieved wider international recognition than Henson, at least until recently. Two years ago, a collection of his work, Lux et Nox, was published by Scale, and last winter, he had his first solo exhibition in New York at Robert Miller Gallery. This included 18 type-C nocturnal photographs from the past five years, showing beautiful, disaffected teenagers in quasi-industrial landscapes, or views of the landscapes alone.
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Henson's subjects are transitional in more ways than one. His settings are the edges of cities, liminal places that can be read as either threatening or intensely seductive. His lonely, languid teenagers--drinking, having sex--are caught between youth and adulthood; they look troubled, though not irretrievably lost. Larry Clark's kids come to mind, but there's something more ambiguous about Henson's teenagers, who seem to be alienated children of suburbia rather than ravaged runaways. In fact, ambiguity seems to be the point of his pictures.
Henson has said that what's not visible in his photographs is just as important as what is. In these works, which are large in scale (50 by 71 inches) and flawlessly printed, the shadows are as important as the people, who seem always on the verge of being swallowed by the encroaching darkness, or else retreating into its protective cover. One image shows a young girl with wet hair standing in the dark. Her thin body fills the frame, and she holds her arms protectively in front of her; except for the neon gas-station sign glowing behind her and off to the side, she could be in the middle of nowhere.
Henson photographs the power lines, train tracks and highway underpasses of his landscapes with an eye to their painterly qualities. One thinks of contemporary photographers like Philip-Lorca diCorcia, with his expertly lit, decontextualized portraits, or Gregory Crewdson's eerie suburbs. Henson himself has mentioned O. Winston Link's photographs of trains as an influence, observing that Link photographed an industrial subject as if it were "the most romantic dreamscape ever painted." Henson's photographs are romantic, too, sometimes intensely so. But where Link's photographs are tinged with nostalgia, Henson's--of alienated young people, the corner of an abandoned-looking house surrounded by overgrown grass, or a view of train tracks and power lines in the glow of a distant urban sprawl--embody a romanticism undercut by ambivalence and unease.
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