Bill Henson | The Monthly

Art Gallery of NSW - 24 September 2011 to 5 February 2012

What’s in a Face? Aspects of Portrait Photography

By Sebastian Smee

What can you read into a photograph of a face? Hurt. Happiness. Confidence. Contempt. There’s no limit. Indeed, if you’re anything like me, you can spend hours staring at family snapshots, greedily seeking – and often finding – things that eluded you in the maelstrom of domestic life. My son, breaking into a toothily anarchic smile: he was proud, ecstatically happy that day. My mother

Edmund Capon's "I Blame Duchamp"

C'est la vie

By Sebastian Smee

No one ever seems surprised by Edmund Capon’s success, for he is charm incarnate. He has led one of Australia’s most visited art galleries, the Art Gallery of New South Wales, since 1978. You watch the way he floats, like pollen, from engagement to engagement – opening this, dropping in on that, giving his blessings to this other – and you can’t help but marvel at the way he does it

David Marr’s ‘The Henson Case’

Unsettled

By Sebastian Smee

'3 Decades of Photography by Bill Henson', National Gallery of Victoria

By Justin Clemens

A young man masturbates, his face and torso scattered across a sequence of photos. Blurry and disjointed, you never see the act itself. Passers-by are captured without knowing it, oblivious to their neighbours, strangers to themselves. Each mono-chrome expression is so singular there seems no right name for it: it is no accident that Henson’s works go unti

Nicole Kidman in 'Birth'

Large Splendid Empty Rooms

By Helen Garner

A light snow is falling. A runner in gloves and hooded black tracksuit goes pounding away from us along the curving paths of Central Park, New York. Enchanting music – flute, a triangle, strings – quivers in the scene’s icy air. At the entrance to a dark