Bill Henson
The Light Fades but the Gods Remain
- PhotographerBill Henson
- GalleryCourtesy of the artist and Roslyn Oxley9 Gallery, Sydney.
Anson Smart Bill Henson is an Australian contemporary artist whose work I have admired from the first time I became interested in photography till now. This particular series resonates with me because like 90% of Australians we grow up in suburban areas. A lot of these images capture a feeling and a sense of place. The images are cinematic, grainy, dark and moody but also capture that feeling of light and shadow as hard Australian light bounces of the red tiled roofs common in suburban Australia.
Returning to a Place Lost in Time
Over three decades after creating his acclaimed Untitled 1985–86 series, Australian photographer Bill Henson returned to Glen Waverley, the Melbourne suburb where he grew up, to create a new body of work reflecting on memory, time and the changing nature of home. Commissioned by the Museum of Australian Photography (MAPh) for its 25th anniversary, The Light Fades but the Gods Remain brings together two significant chapters of Henson’s career: his influential suburban photographs from the 1980s and a new series created in 2018–19.
The Suburban Landscape Reimagined
The original Untitled 1985–86 series transformed the familiar landscape of suburban Melbourne into something mysterious and dreamlike. Rather than presenting suburbia as ordinary or predictable, Henson reveals it as a space filled with emotion, memory and uncertainty. Streets, houses, landscapes and distant figures are captured alongside dreamlike references to ancient Egyptian structures, creating images that feel suspended between the everyday and the imagined.
A Dialogue Between Past and Present
For the new series, Henson revisited the same suburb more than thirty years later, searching for a place that existed somewhere between reality and memory. Although the photographs depict a contemporary environment, they appear to belong to another era – a landscape shaped by personal history rather than by time alone. Through carefully composed scenes and his distinctive use of light and shadow, Henson transforms familiar surroundings into images of quiet intensity and unexpected beauty.
Between Photography and Painting
Henson’s work has long explored the space between the visible world and the world of imagination. His photographs draw on the traditions of romantic painting, using dramatic contrasts of light and darkness to create a sense of mystery and depth. By obscuring details and allowing shadows to dominate the frame, he creates images that invite reflection rather than offering clear answers. The result is a body of work that feels both deeply personal and universally recognisable.
The Continuity of Memory
The Light Fades but the Gods Remain offers an intimate insight into one of Australia’s most celebrated photographic artists and his lifelong engagement with place, memory and transformation. Across two generations of photographs, Henson explores how landscapes carry traces of the past and how places from our childhood continue to exist through imagination. The exhibition becomes a meditation on time itself, on what disappears, what remains, and the lasting connection between places and memory.