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June 05, 2008
[PHOTOGRAPHING DEATH AND YOUTH]
HOW DO YOU FEEL ABOUT PHOTOGRAPHS OF DEAD AND DYING PEOPLE? It certainly doesn’t sound like art, does it. Nevertheless an exhibition of what we might call necrographs has been moving around the country for the past year.
Reveries–Photography and Mortality, has so far been seen at the National Portrait Gallery, the University Art Museum in Queensland and at the Mornington Regional Gallery. The photographs are mostly pretty grim. The images of dying and dead babies are particularly hard to take. And William Yang’s photographic journal of the decline and death from AIDS of his friend, Allan, are unnerving.
So, we might ask, why didn’t the prime minister and the leader of her majesty’s loyal opposition warn us that these pictures are revolting? If they find a photograph of a healthy adolescent revolting what must they make of these images of death?
While some of the photographs have appealing aesthetic qualities most are simply documentary, something that the camera does well. They are not art, any more than the snaps we take on holidays or at family occasions are art.
The best newspaper, magazine, pornographic and advertising photography is a technical triumph, but it holds little interest beyond the subject matter. A work of art, on the other hand, is something that is worth a space on the wall even when we have no idea what the story of the picture might be. It is a thing of beauty, shock or intrigue for its own sake. It is open to us to enter the work and make our own story – it’s called interpretation.
In the history of photography there have been many competent technicians but only a handful of artists whose work is created with the machinery of photography but originates in the mysterious imagination of the artist.
Bill Henson is an artist, not a technician. He has a recognisable style, just as van Gogh and Beethoven had recognisable styles. His style is consistent, no matter what the subject matter – a crumpled newspaper on the ground, two ships coming into port, a twilight streetscape or a naked adolescent. To take the last subject out of the totality of the Henson vision and to declare it “creepy” or “revolting” is to do the artist an injustice. Have a look at his work, with his portraits in context.
The New Yorker magazine compares Henson’s work to “Flemish still lifes” in their depiction of “battered landscapes and fragile, wispy youths”.
Henson’s work is chilly and austere. It is also daring in its resistance to the sharper-is-better tyranny that has most of us under its sway. His pictures have a wintry, misty beauty that is the antithesis of pornography, which is warm, voluptuous and pin sharp. Only the most dirty minded self-appointed guardians of our morals would see any similarity of intent or style between Henson and Penthouse.
Mind you, Bill Henson’s work is profoundly depressing for the average amateur snapper with pretensions to being a “photographer”. Stand in front of one of his massive prints, produced with old-fashioned wet-process chemicals, and you know you could never match it. You could imitate his style easily, even with digital, but imitation is merely the tribute that mediocrity pays to genius.
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Posted by terry at June 5, 2008 12:15 AM
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