Nocturne: The Photographs of Bill Henson
Interview By Dominic Sidhu

Although Bill Henson has been long recognized in his native Australia, only in the past decade has this truly original and unprecedented artist become recognized in the international art world. Lauded for his independence, Henson’s intensely emotive portraiture challenges the concept-driven focus dominating contemporary photography. His work has been celebrated by critics for embodying the formal elements of painting and cinematography. Henson’s haunting images of androgynous adolescence adrift in nocturnal wilderness inhabit a state of primal hypnotic tension.

This work has placed him at the forefront of the international art world. Henson’s work was exhibited in the 1995 Venice Biennale and is included in all major Australian collections including the National Gallery of Victoria, and internationally, in collections including the Solomon R. Guggenheim Museum, New York, the San Francisco Museum of Modern Art, and in the Bibliothèque Nationale de Paris.

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.

How do these images evolve?
I tend to just work continuously. I don’t have a vision for an end product or an exhibition when I’m working. In Lux et Nox, for instance, I would shoot stuff I saw out on the landscape, on the street or on the run. And I would also set things up and carefully control things in the studio. It is interesting how you can end up with a group of pictures, some of which were made as life just happened in front of you, without your direct involvement, and others which were made as a result of a carefully controlled situation.

Do you see your work as process driven?
I don’t see myself as being process oriented anymore than anyone else. In the end, none of this stuff matters, because any kind of process leads toward the completion of a physical work of art. The last thing you want when you’re reading a work of fiction is to be conscious of the author’s intentions in terms of the reader. The moment that happens, the spell is broken. It is the same with art, whether its photographs, paintings, or sculptures, it doesn’t matter. It is about disappearing into the overall experience of the work.

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.

Does the Australian landscape hold this fascination for you?
Of course it does. It is where I live, it is where I am. The reason behind the ambiguity or unknown dimension to the landscape element in all my pictures is that I’ve always been fascinated with intervals in the landscape, the no man’s land between one thing and another thing. It is like the vacant lot between the shopping mall and the petrol station.

All those kind of intervals in the landscape are a universal theme. It does not matter which country you’re in, they are everywhere. What is interesting is that this is also where kids naturally go to muck around. Kids naturally gravitate toward that sort of interval in the landscape. I suppose, as we grow older, all those places sort of become a bit of a lost domain.

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.

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.

Throughout your work there is a dynamic of shifting emotional proximity with the subjects moving between distance and intimacy.
One thing that I’m very much aware of and have always found of critical importance is sensing the distance between oneself and the subject. I think that creating something which is intensely intimate without being at all familiar is sort of central to how photography works. When you’re lying on the floor at night with the lights out, listening to Mozart, it is an intensely intimate experience, but it is not in any way familiar.

Photography to me is about finding that intensely intimate element without any presumption of familiarity. That really is about distance or, if you like, the gap between yourself and the subject; and how you charge and electrify that gap. I suppose it has to be at once an unbridgeable gulf and, at the same time, something which has such a tender, proximate breathing presence, that it almost feels as though it’s not separate from oneself.

You’ve been creating major works since the 1970s. You had your first museum show in Australia when you were nineteen. But it wasn’t until the mid-nineties that you’ve received international acclaim.
I’ve done nothing else but make my work for the past twenty-five or thirty years. But I’ve never approached anyone for an exhibition in my life. It is up to other people to come to me. I never think of myself as in any way responding to an art market or a scene. I can’t emphasize that enough. When I’m working, I’m totally absorbed in what I’m doing. Once my work leaves me, once I’ve done as much as I can, it goes out into the world and takes on a life of its own. This has nothing to do with me, at one level.

It is interesting because I might meet people who have had, for many years, a very intense relationship with one of my pictures hanging on their wall, above their bed or somewhere. They want to tell me how much it’s affected them, and how much they’ve liked it. That’s always wonderful to hear, and I certainly don’t take it for granted. But, really, they’re telling me about their relationship with one of my pictures, not me.

Images by Bill Henson. Courtesy Robert Miller Gallery, New York