Mnemosyne. Photographs by Bill Henson. Essays by Judy Annear, Jennie Boddington, Edmund Capon, Dennis Cooper, Peter Craven, Isobel Crombie, John Forbes. Scalo, 2005. 504 pp. Thick folio. First edition. Clothbound in photo-illustrated dust jacket. 407 color and black-and-white reproductions.
Published on the occasion of the artist’s retrospective at the Art Gallery of New South Wales, Sydney, opening January 2005. After the international success of Lux et Nox Scalo published this definitive mid-life retrospective book on Australian artist Bill Henson. The book combines all groups of work to that point, from his early Ballet pictures (1974), to his body and nude portraits (1977-1986), from his photographs of street-crowds (1979-1982) to his Baroque Triptychs (1983-84), from his fantastic combinations of pictures taken in the Australian Suburbs and Egypt (1985/86) to his Los Angeles and New York nightscapes of (1987-88), from his famous Cut-Out collages shown at the centenary Venice Biennale in 1995, to the portraits of adolescents and his magical color compositions for the Paris Opera (1990/91), and, most recently, a haunting selection of his images of children adrift in the wilderness of night (1997 – 2004), many of these appearing for the first time. Bill Henson is a continent in photography to be discovered. This book will be one of Scalo’s major contributions to the understanding of contemporary photography.
Additional essays by Michael Heyward, Alwynne Mackie, David Malouf, Bernice Murphy, Peter schjeldahl, and an interiew with Bill Henson by Sebastian Smee.
Fine- in Near Fine+ jacket; trace of soiling to page edges at one corner; a few surface scratches and some wear to extremities of jacket (hard to avoid with a book of this heft!) |
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