Bill Henson

Bill Henson: Photographs by Bill Henson, introduction by David Malouf

September 1988, no. 104

Helen Grace reviews 'Bill Henson: Photographs' by Bill Henson, introduced by David Malouf

In under a decade Bill Henson has managed, by careful and strategic marketing, to become probably Australia’s leading art photographer. This status is based on the precise circulation of three or four exhibitions of work, Untitled Sequence 1979, the Untitled 1980–82 series, the Untitled 1983–84 series, and the Untitled 1985–86 series. The titles indicate a continuity of practice rather than anything else, a statement that the photographer has been engaged throughout this time in producing work. By an economic placement of the work in different commercial and public galleries around the country and in contemporary survey shows, such as the 1981 Perspecta and more significantly, the Australian Bicentennial Perspecta, Henson has managed to maximize the exposure and impact of his work. The Australian Bicentennial Perspecta provides a useful means of circulating the work internationally (the exhibition has been shown in Germany), although Henson, like most of us, does not really need the bicentennial; it simply provides a free trip into the international market in which Henson’s work is already placed by virtue of its content and formal qualities.

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The Henson Case by David Marr

by Peter Rose •

November 2008, no. 306

Peter Rose reviews 'The Henson Case' by David Marr

Panic, David Marr has stated since the publication of this book, is what he writes about: why people panic, what they panic about, and how they express it. Clearly, with his investigative skills and his access to different worlds, Marr was the idea ...

Bill Henson and the anatomy of melancholy

by Luke Morgan •

June–July 2005, no. 272

The late Susan Sontag suggested that the photograph ‘offers a modern counterpart of that characteristically romantic architectural genre, the artificial ruin: the ruin which is created in order to deepen the historical character of a landscape, to make nature suggestive, suggestive of the past’. On viewing the retrospective exhibition Bill Henson: Three Decades of Photography, which was organised by the Art Gallery of New South Wales and is now at The Ian Potter Centre: National Gallery of Victoria Australia (NGVA), this familiar idea of the photograph as memento mori struck me as peculiarly apposite. Although the experience of Henson’s photographs is not quite the eighteenth-century one of sighing over ruins, the tone of the exhibition is distinctly melancholic, something like a syncopated elegy in pictures.

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