An image from Bill Henson's Luminous project.
From the moment you enter this enormous exhibition, you're convinced of one fact: Bill Henson is a serious photographer.
The suite of rooms is filled, almost oppressively, with photographs of a consistent vision, from the 1970s to the present decade. Many are memorable, not because they have been reproduced so often but because the imagery and style have an eerie congruence - dark, suspended in action and often sexually charged.
Henson's manner is distinctive, with two defining features:
He takes his pictures in low, directional light. The shots are a bit underexposed, producing dark prints. Second, the perspective is telephoto, almost telescopic, so you are always a long way from the motif and yet have the paradoxical privilege of scrutinising it up close, as if with a freakish clarity, an evocative flash that defies the surrounding shade.
Henson's pictures are muted in definition rather than sharp. They aspire to painting, as in the pictorialist tradition of Edwardian times. And often a spooky alliance between the film's grain and the cellular character of skin emerges, making the medium breathe with the suggestion of living tissue.
Similar correspondences arise between the medium and vapour, especially the thick air of dusk that holds onto the light and filters it in ponderous ways.
There is plenty to praise in Henson's output, and plenty of authorities provide the applause. Henson is considered not only a grand technical master of light but an intuitive musical photographer who uses a camera as a painter might use a brush and colours.
Henson is esteemed for his consistency of vision and artistic sincerity, never deviating from his poetic invention through the several tides of fashionable theory that have washed away the integrity of visual language in contemporary art.
I have never shared this enthusiasm for Henson's work and the current exhibition helps me understand why. There's an uneasy thematic coherence in the several rooms, namely a mixture of landscape and figure.
Landscapes are persistently juxtaposed with figures, almost so that the portent of the evening skies is induced upon the figures, who are dour and possessed.
On their own, the landscapes are beautiful, majestic and haunting. But the arbitrary interspersing of figures strikes me as pretentious, if not cynical. Instead of adding meaning, the combination devalues the artistic intention of the landscapes.
What do suburban hills have to do with a naked girl touching herself in bed? Or how does a picture of a remote house relate to a portrait? The patterns of such iconographic nonsense are too consistent to be accidental. To me, it is a strategy of artificial mystification, as if some Wagnerian gravity superintends the universe and spiritually justifies a vulgar relish in depicting naked, pouting youngsters.
Henson's interest in juvenile erotica is not redeemed by the bombast of gloomy sites and leaden skies, nor is it compensated for by slicing up the photographic paper or dimming the lights in the installation (as in room eight) to the point that it is hard to read the labels.
Unfortunately, the good landscape work is discredited when used as a backdrop for rehearsing the lubricious display of nubile or pre-pubescent children.
With all its sublime operatic temper, Henson's content nestles uncomfortably between the sinister and the trivial. He likes to photograph young people either in open erotic transport or as a passive target for the viewer's lust. He does this with a long lens, where the focal length lets you ogle at the several smooch-kittens from 40 paces. It is an aesthetic of spying, granting you an illicit glimpse, as in all pornographic genres, a teasing sexual spectacle with ocular impunity.
Henson's grope in the gloaming has unpleasant moral overtones, as when the participants are too young for sex. The film-noir sonority of the prints somehow fails to attenuate the flagrant voyeurism of the vision, a sense of scoring a lascivious flash or finding the most titillating combination of female helplessness and masculine strength.
If the work provided a confessional record of a photographer's morbid predilections, it would achieve artistic integrity, owning up to the perverse pulse of the prowl, perhaps to express the stalking spirit as compulsive or natural.
Art is big enough to accommodate all sorts; for example, I sense the confessional frisson of the exhibitionist in the risque work of Jane Burton, at Gallery 101. The problem with Henson is that skulking is not projected as abject but grandiose, serenely unfathomable and authorised by the cosmological forces of the heavens at dusk.
While the landscapes are the outcome of the photographer waiting for the light to fade, the figure work is a theatrical apparatus.
The models do their performance so that we think it is natural. The figures are captured in feigned rapture, as in the frivolous fantasies of fashion magazines, where a young woman is paid to look orgasmic and everyone concerned hopes to make a lot of money.