![]() ![]() In its own peculiar way, Henson’s black is as unique an achievement as, say, Robert Ryrnan’s white. It looks as solid as lead, a physical threat to the teens it blankets, and at the same time it’s as if the blackness were exuded by their bodies, forming a kind of paranormal manifestation of some feeling too intense and guarded to register in any other fashion. It’s a black that seems both to be caked on the surface of the photographs, like tar or centuries of soot, and to recede infinitely into the background. ![]() What becomes apparent when you see Henson’s work in person is the importance of the almost pitch-black darkness that, in whatever formal context he has devised over the years, always cloaks his forlorn, defiantly unneedy subjects, giving their run-down urban environments the look of remote desert outposts. In this recent work, boys and girls stand, sit, and lounge around alone or in seemingly romantic couplings, their averted faces revealing emotions so deep, mixed-up, and masked in achy casualness that one searches the photographs’ compositions and patina for the aesthetic system that makes such intimacy possible. And by the time he had his long-delayed solo gallery show in 1999 at Karyn Lovegrove in Los Angeles, the experiments with collage and multipaneling had given way to large framed photographs that engaged even more unobtrusively with the psyches of his young subjects. Again, as in Henson’s almost too blatant parallel between the superficial spoils of the privileged and the ruined internal lives of the young and disenfranchised,his aggressive cuts and reassemblages bordered dangerously on a dumbass, obvious way of signifying his subjects’ interpersonal agonies yet some depth of understanding and level of finesse at which the reproductions could only hint left an almost addictive longing to search out these pictures and deconstruct their effect.ĭespite the Biennale exposure, it would be another six years before I would see Henson’s work in America. ![]() It was as if the orgy in Antonioni’s Zabriskie Point had gone on past the point of exhaustion and into some posterotic realm where sex was the only cure for unquenchable loneliness. In place of the multipanel photographs from the ’80s there were autonomous, single-frame images containing pictures, violently cut-up and then collaged, of young, pale, faceless bodies fucking, sometimes in large groups, in dark, apparently cavernous locales. By then, his work had phased into something more sexually explicit and emotionally diffuse. In 1995, there was a rare Henson sighting in the form of another catalogue for the photographer’s aforementioned Australian pavilion exhibit in Venice. The experience of being haunted by reproductions of contemporary artworks, with no real hope of comparing them to the originals, or investigating the work’s context, or having even a small library of criticism against which to check one’s opinions, constitutes an odd and not unpowerful dilemma-one that living in the art-importing center of the world normally prevents. Yet there was a purity of intention that turned these heavy-handed gestures into acts of moving, even desperate complicity, the way an opera’s rigorously expelled emotion can turn its overstated musical phrasings into profound instruments. The dichotomy between luxurious empty decors and undressed tormented characters was over the top, to be sure. Unlike the subjects in Clark’s or Goldin’s similarly populated work, Henson’s figures were approached with such unreserved empathy and preserved with such an artfully impersonal, elegant visual luster that they became strangely interchangeable with their lavish architectural counterparts. The teens appeared to be addicts, prostitutes, and runaways snapped at moments of intense self-mourning. The catalogue featured a then-fresh series of diptychs and triptychs that juxtaposed portraits of naked, dirt-smudged teens looking almost like coal miners with images depicting the interiors of palatial homes filled with antiques and old master-ish paintings. In the mid-’80s he began to produce color photographs focused almost exclusively on introverted, compellingly beautiful teenage outsiders and the abandoned buildings, vacant lots, and deserted back roads that formed their turf. In the ’70s and early ’80s he was known for his black-and-white, mock-candid, quasi daguerreotype images of self-absorbed individuals lost in crowds or striking solitary expressive poses in gloom-shrouded voids. ![]() Just prior to the appearance of that catalogue, a permanent realignment had taken place in Henson’s work. ![]()
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