capturemag.com.au
[capture] sep_oct.19format prints. So too are the mysteriously lush and dark landscapes from
locations around Italy and juxtaposed against the human forms.
Photographer Bill Henson’s first solo show in Sydney in seven years
couldn’t belong to any other artist.”
Unchanged and unwearied
“I don’t think people change below a certain level,” Henson says of the
impact that maturity has had on his work. “We all navigate each day as
it comes along and the world changes. We’re always changing to an
extent, reimagining our situations. As one grows older, one gets a
certain sense of proportion or perspective that you can’t possibly have
at a younger age, but I don’t think the essential nature of what
interested me thirty or forty years ago when I was making
photographs and what interests me now has changed that
much. I think my work has stayed the same.”
What has changed, although triflingly really, is the
way in which Henson works. It had to. “In 2008,
the really significant thing that happened to me
was that I ran out of analogue paper,” he explains.
“This beautiful photographic German paper that
I used to develop with chemicals was no longer
available.” The company had shut down and it
was no longer made. “That was a big deal,” he
continues. “I had to make a transition to inkjet
printing. I still shoot on negative film. I still use a
film camera. None of that has changed, but I had
to go on a very steep learning curve that took
about a year. And I was thinking at the time if I
can no longer make the kind of pictures I want to
make, maybe I’ll go back to making things out of clay.”
Serendipity stepped in, however, and Henson befriended an
old acquaintance, the artist, Les Walkling.
“He had become a technical genius where digital imaging is
concerned and he very generously spent the better part of a year in my
studio customising the machinery we had to buy, writing software, going
in and out of his global think tanks with other techs, and helping me put
together the kind of system I needed to make the kind of prints I wanted
to make.” Henson made the transition to making his actual prints
digitally, but he admits that it was an interesting challenge. “I still use
an old-fashioned 35mm SLR camera and shoot old-fashioned negative
film, and still process it C-41. I still make contact proof sheets, get out
my magnifying glass and a white Chinagraph pencil, and circle the ones
I like. It’s like a scene from Blow-Up. But they sit there on my desk for
months and sometime for years and then, when I’m ready, I’ll scan
the negative I think I am going to need from that shoot.”
Henson is sure that his ambitions around his work are
keener now. “I feel more like a kid in sandpit than I did
when I was twenty, so the energy that comes back to
me through the business of trying to make
something reinvigorates me and rekindles my
thirst, my hunger, my appetite, my curiosity. In
a way, it’s a circular thing. You work hard and
you’re absorbed in something. Mostly it’s
appalling, but sometimes it’s amazing. When it’s
appalling you feel like a fool and it’s all your
fault, because, after all, one has complete
freedom and total responsibility. However, when
the work’s something that I really love, I feel as
though it made itself and I’ve just been along for
the ride. The appetite and the smell of something
you can’t even understand, that apprehension of
significance not fully understood, draws you on. Later
in life it draws you on with a much greater pull – the sheer
weight of accumulated knowledge, the experiences you’ve had.PTION: Xxxxx
xxxx xxxx xxxx
xxx xxx xxx x xx.LEFT: Untitled
2000-01.
LMO SH163 N15A
Type C photograph
127 x 180 cm
Edition of 5 + AP 2
BELOW: Untitled
2014-15.
LS SH664 N16D
Archival inkjet
pigment print
Edition of 5 + 2 AP
FAR LEFT: Untitled
2009-10.
CL SH658 N28B
Archival inkjet
pigment print
180 x 127 cm
Edition of 5 + AP 2