Bill Henson (born 7 October 1955) is an Australian contemporary art photographer.
When you go to a great concert something that happens is there is a deep sense of communality and connectedness one to another - as though we are all looking to eachother and saying yeah, we get it, we're all on one page.
No medium is more limited than any other. It's what a person does with it. We could talk about the differences between music and literature and photography, sure, but it really comes down to what a person does.
When you shoot on film, you don't know whether you've got it or not until you get the film processed, and so it changes the relationship we have with the subject whether it's a landscape or a person in a so-called controlled environment in a chair in a studio in front of you.
It just struck me that one of the things about photography that made it such a compelling medium to deal with is that it is perhaps the most contradictory of mediums.
I could be standing in the supermarket, and there is a person standing down the aisle, who is reading the back of a cornflakes box but everything about them is going "It's me! I'm the one you want! I am the necessary subject. This is it!"
As a boy I was obsessed with Egypt and Egyptology. I'm convinced it's not that uncommon. A lot of 10 or 12 year old boys become obsessed with Egypt. It's a bit like young girls and horses.
You spend your whole life trapped inside your body. Everything you know about the world comes to you through your body.
Adolescence is interesting. I mean, all of life is interesting and all of life is transitionary. But I think there is an exponential growth physically, intellectually, emotionally and there is so much potential.
There are no inherent limitations to the medium. There are just differences.
The world is a colony of the US. The twentieth century was the US's century.
You pick up a camera because something has been revealed to you in the landscape or in the human-scape. And you have no choice because it's a gift. And it's like, oh right, I better start doing this!
For all the textbook reasons - any individual's reading of a photograph is preceded by the evidential authority of the medium. You have the literalness of a glass on a table - and at the same time of that evidential authority that you can't get around, there is the possibility of universalizing the subject - of getting the whole world into the picture.
It's a profoundly different thing to be able to refer to the images you are taking at the time and check them out on a laptop that is plugged into your Hasselblad and go "oh no, do it again, do it again" - all of those a requickly made decisions. The fact that you can see the images right away in a funny way makes the whole relationship more casual. I don't want a casual relationship with my subject.
What happens with experiences that really move us deeply, that really effect us? They make the world new again. What it does is it heightens our sense of mortality.
On practical level I can't pick up the camera until I think I know what I want. I don't wander around. It's almost impossible for me to pick up a camera. . . it's really hard.