What Roland Barthes wrote in his Fragments of a Lover’s Discourse can be appositely applied to the work of the Australian photographer Bill Henson. In his prolific output that now spans three decades, the Melbourne-based artist has never ceased to beguile audiences with his gloomy portraits and eerie landscapes emerging from hazy backgrounds. Independently shot yet unmistakably complementary, both people and topography appear adrift, consumed by some sort of post-coital distress, lost in a superimposed torpor.

In the Paris Opera Project at the beginning of the 90s, Henson instilled his images with a soupçon of the Barthian languor. Although some of the solitary faces in the series could be perceived as immersed in the atmosphere of a spectacle, largely due to the creator’s choice of titles, if removed from the appointed context they could effortlessly allude to a latent erotic yearning, one that has no obvious recipient but longs to find one. In his subsequent work, the numerous untitled projects, Henson avoided offering any hints on his subjects’ emotional state. It was by then clear that the suppressed yearning, so far a rather clandestine insinuation running through his work, had turned into an overwhelming passion whose sated aftermath we were openly invited to witness.

By focusing his attention entirely on adolescents, his work became instantly charged with the perplexity that such a transitory state in life generates: that confusing moment when all senses are dominated by a crushing urge to explore the core of the long-felt desire that leads to adulthood while carrying along faded yet unambiguous traces of childhood. Henson’s work captures the temporal threshold around which these teenagers oscillate and the way in which they become unwittingly tangled in the web of what Barthes refers to as the Greek ‘Imeros’ and ‘Pothos’: respectively, the burning desire for the present being and the subtler desire for the absent being. It would seem that the dirt-smudged teenagers caught in cinematographic shots have devoured and satisfied their thirst for their personified ‘Imeros’ but find themselves longing for the elusive ‘Pothos’: a desire for the unknown, the non-present. In this quest, they are tragically lonely. Although the intimacy between them seems impenetrable to outsiders, it bears no promise of a mutual, abiding bond.

The artist depicts his characters at the moment they become aware of the chimera and respond to it with a perplex idleness that emanates from every pore of their unfledged bodies. Surrounded by impenetrable darkness, they exude an aura of martyrdom as they have just demystified what they were craving for and been abruptly deprived of their childhood illusions. His dramatic use of light accentuates this idea; the misty twilight throws their bodies into a rapt chiaroscuro illuminating their ‘debaucheries’ in a rather graceful way. Yet Henson’s scraggy bodies are not virtuous. Their frugality is merely an explicit embodiment of Barthes’s erotic asceticism that cries inwardly to the loved one: “Turn back, look at me, see what you have made of me.” But there’s no grudge in this lament, for these people, in the prime of their youth, cling to life in a somnambulistic state that excludes any explicit variation in emotions.

They seem immersed in nirvana-like lethargy that justifies their lack of conventional inhibitions. Oblivious of their surroundings, they seem unaware of the viewers, sparing them thus from any guilt stemming from their voyeurism.

Little can be known of these adolescents or of the nocturnal backgrounds into which they vanish; one can only speculate about their occupation and provenance. They could easily be typecast as runaways, prostitutes or addicts that crawl in the margin of an Australian city. But there’s no need for such aphorisms. Their anonymity prompts the viewers to scour through their Barthian long-forgotten ‘image-repertoire’ and fish out their own moments of similar interpersonal anguish. Once the viewers get past the transgressive nature of the image, they are destined to empathise with the solitary girls and boys.

Henson’s landscapes bear the same traits as his portraits. Just as he does in the latter, his landscapes are scenery dipped into darkness that has been suddenly thrown into the light. Stripped from any palpable human presence, they emanate a preternatural aura while their state of abandonment conveys a sense of unworldliness. They provide the ideal set to intensify languid self-mourning and the chimeric anticipation of ‘Pothos’, much like his portraits. “When one waits, everything around him is stricken with unreality,” Barthes writes. Seeking that rare co-existence between landscape and the human figure, between the universal and the particular, between ‘Imeros’ and ‘Pothos’, and between self-identification and distancing, is the strength of Bill Henson’s vision, his own private terrain.