Bill Henson at the Opera

I went to see a few of the short films at the Tribeca Film Festival this weekend, and was so struck by some of the imagery that it stuck in my head for hours afterwards. I always remember images more than narrative.

The seven shorts we saw were all centered on themes of coming-of-age, and the morning after, I felt compelled to pull out Mnemosyne, Bill Henson's 2005 definitive retrospective book from Scalo. This is perhaps my most prized photo book of all; I discovered his portraits of adolescents adrift in the night while a PE at Nerve.com, and was absolutely transfixed. Henson is Australian, and his catalog is deep; included in this book are projects that span twenty years, starting in the mid-seventies, including a project on ballet, body and nude portraits, photographs of street-crowds, Baroque Triptychs, pictures taken in the Australian suburbs and Egypt, Los Angeles and New York nightscapes, and his famous cut-out collages shown at the centenary Venice Biennale in 1995.

But this time, it was the magical compositions of Henson's Paris Opera Project from 1990-91 that grabbed me. I can't quite understand how he was able to make these images; the lighting is simply stunning, and the poses as lyrical as it gets. I did a little hunting around, and found an interview by Dominic Sidhu with Henson at EGO Magazine that answers some of my questions. The most topical:

The figures seem darkened or rather that they are moving in and out of imposed darkness. How do you achieve your effect?
I always shoot on negative film because it has potential for far greater extremes in lighting situations. And also, negative film is designed to be half the process, the second half being the making of the print. More often than not, I make test prints and let them sit around in a kind of semi-finished state. Gradually, my ideas start to shift as to what this image could be about and how I should modulate it formally and technically. It is quite a lengthy process. I go into the darkroom, change the density of some areas, or maybe change the emphasis between various elements within the picture, and push it around.

The exhibition prints don't look anything like the original negative that came out of the camera. My work is all done in the traditional manner in the darkroom; there's no digital technology in there mainly because I do not find it useful for my work.


With the Paris Opera House series, you spoke about a universal primal reaction to music that is beyond class distinctions.
What I was interested in terms of Paris Opera series was that whole strange business of finding oneself with a whole lot of other people gathered in a darkened space, such as the opera, awaiting some special event. There is something quite magical about it. I've always found that people sitting in the dark just waiting for something is the most haunting sort of experience. It seemed to me it was a common experience, a universal thing that everyone feels, really, at some point or another.

Your teenage subjects seem to exist outside of society in an almost hypnotic state.
The reason I like working with teenagers is because they represent a kind of breach between the dimensions that people cross through. The classical root of the word "adolescence" means to grow towards something. I am fascinated with that interval, that sort of highly ambiguous and uncertain period where you have an exponential growth of experience and knowledge, but also a kind of tenuous grasp on the certainties of adult life.

There is a kind of removal in your pictures. It's as if the emptiness in the photograph, the disappearance of detail, and the figure within in it become the focus of the photograph rather than the subject itself.
Well, putting it in other words, the photograph has to suggest, not prescribe. Any work of art needs to do that. From my point of view, art is what almost goes missing in the shadows. It is what is not clearly delineated but, in fact, just suggested. Rather than the clearly described surface detail of a highlight of skin, or the surface of a tree or something, it's when the light slides off into a sort of half shadow and darkness. It is the way in which you somehow have something, but do not have it, that offers the greatest potential.











See a wide selection of Henson imagery here.

And see some of the Tribeca shorts online, here.
Original here