Henson’s admirers, a number of whose essays are republished in the beautifully produced book that accompanies the exhibition, Bill Henson: Mnemosyne, have always celebrated what they regard as the poetic strain in his work. As the book amply demonstrates, Henson’s photographs have consistently elicited fine sentences from the likes of David Malouf, Michael Heyward, Peter Schjedahl, Peter Craven, Dennis Cooper, and especially John Forbes. In fact, poets and novelists, rather than professional critics, historians, or curators, dominate the list of contributors. This probably reflects a conscious decision to include texts that are primarily literary in tenor and that, en masse, act as a poetic corollary or bulwark to the photographs. It may also explain why so many of these authors compare Henson’s work with poetry.

Malouf, for instance, argues that Henson’s photographs are ‘like poetry’ in the sense that they speak a private language despite the fact that the poem and the photograph both make use of everyday means: speech and the camera. ‘As with each new poem we meet, we have first to learn the language …’ The language of Henson’s photographs is, however, a remarkably consistent one. As the exhibition reveals, his artistic concerns have remained much the same over the course of three decades. (Henson’s first solo exhibition was at the NGV exactly thirty years ago in 1975, when he was only nineteen.)

The most interesting photographs of the exhibition – the ‘cut screens’ of the series that begins with Untitled 1992/3 and that includes the works shown at the Venice Biennale in 1995, when Henson was selected to represent Australia – consist of fragments, sometimes cut or torn from earlier photographs, which have been juxtaposed with other fragments and pieces of white glassine or photographic paper and then pinned or taped to the support. The pale, occasionally gaunt bodies of Henson’s young models are depicted performing their obscure roles against dramatically lit backdrops: a mountain range, a dark wood, lowering skies and a nocturnal cityscape. Perhaps these scenes are ‘perfect crimes’, as in Brancusi’s suggestion that art, like crime, is committed in ‘austerity and drama’. There is a deliberate artifice, even an operatic quality to the images, which have effectively been staged twice: once for the original images, and again when the pieces are rearranged in new tableaux.

It would be too easy to dismiss these photographs as simplistic variations on hoary old Freudian ideas about the interrelatedness of sex and death, which gain whatever transgressive frisson they may have from Henson’s predilection for adolescent models. Although Henson’s photographs at times tread the fine line between pathos and bathos, I would suggest that they generally avoid slipping over into the bathetic. Above all, perhaps, it is the sheer expressive power of the photographs that overwhelms any pat solution to their implications.

This is not to say that Henson’s ‘nostalgic, classical, romantically despairing’ sensibility, as the film critic Adrian Martin characterised it in a negative review of 1985, will appeal to everyone. The bleak landscapes, apparent allusions to (sub)urban decay and disenfranchised youth are non-specific, apolitical and devoid of moral content. Depending on your point of view, they may seem blithely or stubbornly to resist a moral position. Yet Henson’s ‘sensibility’, to use that slippery term, can at least be located and fleshed out a little, even if the fugitive narratives of his photographs often cannot.

If Henson’s language is poetic, then it is the poetic language of elegy that is his preferred mode. His photographs elegise, which is what I take to be the significance of the title Mnemosyne, who in Greek mythology is the goddess of memory and mother of the muses. To elegise is to compose a poem or song in memory of the dead. The question, therefore, is: what or whom do these images elegise or memorialise?

In his eloquent essay, Forbes describes the cut screens as ‘shattered paysages moralisés’ that evoke the ‘transience of the body’, recalling Sontag’s suggestion that every photograph is a memento mori: a witness to the passing of time and to the mutability of things. Paintings on this theme (Watteau’s are probably the best known) present what seem at first to be untrammelled Arcadian idylls: perpetual dreams of midsummer nights. Yet Arcadia, by tradition, is always a threatened paradise. The poignancy of its bitter-sweet pleasures is intensified by the certain knowledge of the brevity of the moment, even in the midst of the idyll. This is the underlying message of one of the greatest meditations on the theme in visual art: Poussin’s Et in Arcadia Ego, in the Louvre. Arcadia, to be Arcadia, must be temporary. Henson’s ‘cut screens’ would seem to belong in this tradition. The numinous landscapes, cityscapes, and skyscapes that his models are posed against imply a similar sentiment. He may give us a junk-strewn and even junkie version of the idyll, but the theme remains recognisable and historically informed.

Henson’s interest in early modern European art has often been noticed. There are numerous allusions to old master painting in his oeuvre. Perhaps the most obvious is to the work of Caravaggio, which possesses the same contradictory quality of theatrical realism, not to mention dramatic chiaroscuro. Henson’s most recent images, especially those in which the figures have been almost completely enveloped in darkness, also recall Rembrandt’s experimental prints. In some of these, the artist’s constant reworking of the plate resulted in impressions in which the figuration of the earlier states is almost entirely sacrificed to a veil of rich black ink.

The Paris Opera Project 1990/91, installed in Room Five at the NGVA, is full of references to European painting. Characteristically, the series amounts to a single extended work or ‘superpolyptych’. It might be thought of as a kind of expansion of the idea behind a photographic triptych from the series Untitled 1983/84. In the earlier work, a detail from Titian’s Madonna di Ca’ Pesaro in the Frari in Venice appears on each side of the central image of a young man’s face. Both of these ‘wings’ depict the boy Leonardo Pesaro, the nephew of Titian’s patron, Jacopo. Leonardo is the only figure in the Pesaro altarpiece who looks out at the viewer, making psychological contact with us. In one of the photographs from the Paris Opera Project, a young girl of approximately the same age and with more than a passing resemblance to him also gazes out at us. As in Titian’s painting, she is the only figure in the room that acknowledges the viewer’s presence. Henson’s other subjects are absorbed in an event that we are unable to see, presumably the performance. In this sense, the Paris Opera Project also provides a good example of Henson’s self-professed preoccupation with the paradoxical proximity and distance established by the photographic image: a form of ‘intimate immensity’, to borrow Gaston Bachelard’s phrase from The Poetics of Space (1957).

In sum, Bill Henson: Three Decades of Photography is an absorbing exhibition and, as the first major survey of Henson’s career, an important one. It reveals an artist who over three decades has maintained his focus on the same thematic territory, one paradigm of which is the melancholy Arcadia with its ‘artificial ruins’ that serve to deepen the allusiveness of the landscape; whose principal mode is elegiac; and whose ‘sensibility’ is authentically but somewhat anomalously Romantic. The accompanying book is lavish and superbly produced. My only real criticism would be that in reproducing essays that have mainly been published elsewhere (Isobel Crombie’s valuable account of Henson’s artistic practice has appeared more than once in other places, including the March–April 2005 issue of the NGV magazine Gallery), an opportunity has been missed to attempt a broad assessment of Henson’s work to date. No doubt that will come in time.