I'm in a dead-end street in Melbourne's inner north, standing at an ivy-draped brick wall and a towering gate. Behind the gate lives Bill Henson, one of Australia's greatest, and most controversial, photographers. I press the buzzer, thinking of what Henson's friend, Barry Humphries, said about this palmshaded compound: a visit, he wrote, is "always a great event". Moments later, Henson – sinewy, with a long bare forehead and thinning, greying collar-length hair – appears from a mid-compound door, a black Staffordshire bull terrier menacing ahead. "This is Mr Pigs," Henson, 61, says good-naturedly, clicking open a padlock.
Inside the gate a stillness falls instantly. The rest of the world – the city, Trump, Brexit, everything – fades and I slip into something I now call the Bill Bubble.
In the bubble, art is king. "You can listen to shock jocks screaming about today's disaster if you want," Henson says later. "But [in the morning] I would rather listen to Michelangeli playing Debussy and make a pot of tea." Henson's home has served as a sanctuary before. Like in 2008, when then-prime minister Kevin Rudd condemned Henson's pictures of nude adolescents as "absolutely revolting", and the nation debated whether he was a pornographer masquerading as an artist, or worse, a paedophile.
Henson leads me up some steep stairs – dark, like his work – into an open-plan kitchen area. It's dark here, too. The walls of this 19th-century converted warehouse are brown-black, but like everything Henson does, this is a considered choice: a Bristol paint colour called Henson Marley, devised by the artist (Henson suggests galleries use it before hanging his work). As my eyes adjust, I see painter Louise Hearman, 53, Henson's long-term partner, walking towards me. With a big smile, she checks that Henson has offered me a drink and bustles about fetching me a sparkling water.
The two met in 1981 at the Victorian College of the Arts. Henson was guest-lecturing the photography students. In his typically oblique fashion, the lesson involved playing obscure classical music in the darkroom. Hearman was upstairs in the painting room, and the music, says Henson, "drew her down". Last year, Hearman won the Archibald Prize for a portrait of Barry Humphries, and in 2014 she won the $150,000 Moran Prize for paintings of Henson. "I think she's stared at me enough over the years to have a pretty good idea of what she wanted," he says. They never had any children? "No, we are the only babies in this house." And Mr Pigs, of course. "Yes. And Mr Pigs."
By any measure, Bill Henson is a major international talent. His first solo show was in 1975, at the National Gallery of Victoria. He was 19. In 2005, crowds flocked to his retrospective at the nation's major public galleries. Over a 43-year career, he's exhibited in New York, London and Paris. But for many outside the art world, he's famous not for his darkly beautiful renderings of nudes, landscapes, crowds and ruins. Nor for the exploration of his favourite themes: the potency of adolescence, mortality, longing, beauty and love. It's the 2008 controversy that brought Henson true national fame.
The furore ended in a whimper: no charges were laid over Henson's photographs of a nude 13-year-old girl in his show at Sydney's Roslyn Oxley9 gallery. The Classification Board rated the images PG – "mild" and safe for children.
Henson went on to exhibit adolescent nudes in four commercial shows with no fuss. The artist himself wishes we would all stop talking about it: "The general public will be deeply bored by this," he sighs during one of our interviews. But anxiety about Henson's work – and child protection more broadly – is always there. Like a cold sore, it erupts to the surface given the right conditions. And that's what happened three years ago.
Henson's work was to appear in the 2014 Adelaide Biennial at the Art Gallery of South Australia. But in September 2013, a South Australian policeman, Michael Newbury, wrote to Premier Jay Weatherill urging him to "take a stand against the sexual exploitation of children". Henson had not decided which images – nudes, landscapes or architecture shots – he would exhibit. In other words: no particular image offended Newbury. It was just the idea of Henson exhibiting at all. News Corporation's Adelaide newspapers backed Newbury. "There is something about Henson's work," wrote The Sunday Mail's editor David Penberthy, "which strikes me as creepy."
When, in 2008, his work had attracted similar attention, what followed was a national debate – the law was tested, the work classified safe. In 2013, though, Henson just seemed to roll over. In London at the time, he was briefed on the brewing storm in Adelaide and withdrew from the Biennial. Speaking for the first time about the incident, Henson tells me he could see the media ramping up its rhetoric, the government nervous. He didn't want to jeopardise the gallery's public funding. "I just thought, 'Let's take the heat off.' And I didn't need to necessarily do a show in Adelaide."
His show next month at the National Gallery of Victoria is Henson's first in a large, publicly funded gallery to include adolescent nudes since 2008.
We sit by a window in a corner of Henson's dark study, in front of his computer. The sun, filtering through wind-tossed leaves, is dancing across the desk and Henson's trousers. It's like one of his photographs: mostly dark, with a small amount of light beguiling the eye. He clicks through pictures for the forthcoming Melbourne exhibition.
I am quite comfortable with the fact my pictures happen to disturb people.
He chose the collection, taken between 2008 and 2011, for philanthropist Bill Bowness, who gifted them to the gallery. (Some images have featured in previous commercial gallery shows.) The young nudes with cadaver-white skin are there, as well as dramatic coastlines and a stunning volcano rising from the sea. Henson begins to talk about the images in a conversational style he calls "discursively wandering off". I call it a master class in art history. And that's very much the dynamic between us during this visit: teacher and student, the latter expected not to interrupt too much.
To give you an idea of how Henson's brain works within the Bill Bubble, take his explanation of one image: a nude boy, maybe 13, with a dreamy look on his face and a young girl leaning over him from behind.
The boy, Henson says, could be imagining the girl; like a gender-reversed depiction of death and the maiden (a common artistic trope of a semi-nude woman and the angel of death). He cites Austrian symbolist painter Alfred Kubin, who produced a particularly good death and the maiden, then quotes French sculptor Auguste Rodin on the beauty of destroying the beautiful. He follows up with a reference to wabi-sabi, the concept of imperfection in Japanese aesthetics. And finishes his answer citing the best musical version of the "sweet potential of life in the grip of death", composer Alban Berg's Violin Concerto.
All I saw was a young boy enraptured.
Henson takes me on a tour of his collection of rare books, which Humphries once described as "one of the most interesting and scholarly private libraries in the southern hemisphere". There are novels by the late Irish writer Forrest Reid.
"It's unbelievable that work of such distinction is virtually unknown today," says Henson, who once said he was "very interested in unpopular culture". There are tomes on Rembrandt, a Nabokov collection, the poems of W.H. Auden. Most of the books have "Bill Henson" pencilled inside, except a 1965 volume on Egyptian architecture, which reads "Billy Henson". I picture the serious nine-year-old Billy, his head filled with the wonders of a land so far and foreign to south-east Melbourne's Glen Waverley, back then a place, he recalls, of "unmade roads, orchards and dairy cattle". Henson was closer to his mother than his furrier father, whom he describes as "a little bit mystified by this odd, art-obsessed child". They divorced when he was a teenager. His sister, Elizabeth, is five years younger.
We head down the dark stairs and into the studio where Henson works, sometimes for years, on each worthy negative. It's where he "tickles" out the images from a giant 1.6-metre-wide printer. Framed prints – 180 centimetres wide by 127 centimetres tall – are stacked on trolleys, piling up like "sedimentary layers", he says. "I'm never in a hurry to put the work out.
We leave this room, emerge into the sunlight, and walk across some white gravel to a large, open-door shed. It's here that he brings his young models and their parents. He works with each model for years, as their teenage bodies transform. He photographs adolescents, he says, because "it's a floating world of growing independence and exponential growth; pregnant with meaning and potential for things to go well or not so well". (The Age art critic Robert Nelson says: "It's probably fair to say he's obsessed with young bodies.") Many of his models had recently gathered at his house for a Christmas party. One of his models, from early in Henson's career, is now approaching 50.
Looking out from the open door of Henson's studio, we admire his magnificent walled garden, with palms and ferns nodding over a rectangle of white gravel. At the garden's end is a gate that leads to a backstreet. In the eye of the 2008 storm, with the media parked outside for days, this was one of his escape routes.
His neighbours were helpful, too. When they saw one of the media's white station wagons in the street, they phoned him: "Incoming!" Also, they were going for pizza, did he want one?
On my second visit Henson is dressed more casually: grey jeans and a faded black T-shirt, whose sleeves run snug across taut biceps (his personal trainer turns him into "human paste" three times a week). I tell him there appears to be a parcel shoved in his letter box, which he retrieves. This time, up the stairs and into the darkness, we sit opposite each other at a wooden table. A piece of thick paper has been attached, like a skirt, to the light above us, muting it. The effect is like a Cold War interrogation setting, which suits my plan: this visit, I am not going to let him "discursively wander off". I've read everything about the 2008 controversy – including journalist David Marr's book The Henson Case – and I still had many questions.
In May 2008, invitations were sent out for Henson's exhibition at Roslyn Oxley9 Gallery. An image called Untitled (#30) – chosen by Henson – was featured on the invitation. It was of a girl who became known as N, a 13-year-old whose nipples were just budding into breasts and whose waist was still quite girl-like. As Marr writes, it was the budding breast – "rarely seen and almost never celebrated" – that initially caused such a fuss. "These things aren't sacrosanct, but Henson had broken a powerful little taboo."
Henson had been photographing young nudes for years, and controversy had wafted around him, but this time it hit him with full force. Senator Derryn Hinch, then a Melbourne radio presenter, fretted that the image of N would be "drooled over by paedophiles". Sydney shock jocks went into overdrive. Police raided the gallery, seizing 32 images. The NSW Labor government, recovering from the sentencing of former minister Milton Orkopoulos on child-sex and drug charges, denounced him. Police marched into galleries all over Australia to inspect Henson photographs.
The 2008 controversy exposed a fault line, one David Penberthy neatly characterised in 2013 as "the poseurs versus the plebs": the art world versus everyone else. People were suspicious of Henson; he appeared to want to operate outside society's rules because he was an artist. It rankled. As I researched this piece, most of my male friends – intelligent, considered people – told me they find Henson's work troubling.
"Of course it's art. It may even be great art," says one. "But the problem with Henson and his cheer squad is that they appear to rank artistic freedom more highly than the protection of children." Nelson, The Age art critic, says Henson doesn't try to be a provocateur. But he has that effect. "It triggers people into thinking 'this is paedophilic' and we must act to suppress this disgusting set of thoughts." (Nelson became embroiled in the 2008 controversy when he defended Henson but was denounced because his wife, artist Polixeni Papapetrou, had photographed their young daughter Olympia naked.) Society tells us not to find children or adolescents attractive, says Nelson, and Henson's pictures challenge this: "They have probably lived a life suppressing all sorts of thoughts and along comes the curiosity of an artist to open those thoughts up. For people of insecure ethical mettle, that could be really worrying."
In response to the 2008 furore, NSW changed its child pornography laws in 2010, removing the defence of artistic purpose, and the Australia Council issued protocols for artists working with children. Since then, we've had regular eruptions of anxiety over children in art. The most serious was in 2013, when artist Paul Yore was charged with producing and possessing child pornography because his exhibition at St Kilda's Linden Centre depicted children's faces superimposed on male bodies performing sex acts. A magistrate dismissed the charges.
To Henson, these sorts of controversies reveal that we've lost the ability to see children in a neutral, non-sexual context. "The public imagination has been hijacked by a kind of prurience," he says. "When people see the beauty of the human body, and when it's a young person, they've already had a stick put in them that says 'Vulnerability! Danger!' We get so much of it in the media, the royal commission. It's a national pastime."
In 2008, Henson, unfamiliar with self-doubt, remained calm. None of his opponents' arguments gave him pause. "I just assumed that intelligent, sensitive people around the country – with front page after front page washing over them – would be reflecting on one thing: had my activities damaged any of the models I'd worked with over the years? The rest of it just comes down to taste. Do you like it or don't you? Is it porn or is it art?"
He felt comfortable because he says he knew, as much as he could, that none of his models had ever regretted working with him. And he says that, far from being damaged, his young models are empowered. They follow his instructions – move your head to the left, put your hand here, look there – until they might be doing 30 or 40 things at once. Under such concentration, time flies and they get, says Henson, "this gathering shock of how powerful they are and what their potential is."
Little changed for him after 2008, Henson says. N wanted to get back to modelling two weeks after the hullaballoo began. (Now in her early 20s, N first met Henson through her older sister when she was seven. Henson told her she had "beautiful dark features" and would like to take her picture when she was older.) The episode, he thinks, had little impact on his career, except that more people approach him to say they love his work. He also hasn't changed his practices. The age of his models is the same. He still finds models the same way, he says, despite a secondary controversy in 2008 in which a principal was investigated, and cleared, after she allowed Henson to scout for models at St Kilda Park Primary School.
He looks for models everywhere – at the supermarket ("They can be reading the back of a box of Coco Pops, but everything about them is going, 'I'm here, I'm the one' "), from friends who recommend their children, and yes, still from schools and universities, where he is often invited to speak.
I ask him if he "keeps an eye out" when he goes to make these speeches. "Of course," he says. But then he adds, "It's not that you are keeping an eye out, it's just that you go along and, as always, something attracts your attention."
He concedes only that putting the picture of N on the 2008 invitation was a mistake, and too generous a gift to the media (which he seems to hold in contempt). And on how he has been altered by the experience, he says it's "sharpened and strengthened" his convictions. "It was almost like a gift to go through this thing and come out even more interested in what I am interested in – more in awe of the great beauty of works of art."
One thing that worries me, I tell him, is the consent issue: can a 13-year-old, whose parents give consent, really understand the impact of modelling nude and having their nude photographs floating around later in life? To Henson, it's about the potential for harm. "Parents choose to let their daughters ride horses and young girls fall off and have spinal injuries and either die or become quadriplegic," he says. "Young boys get hit with cricket balls. One moment of harm doesn't excuse another; I am just saying that, in the order of things, the last place you are going to be looking for harm done to young people is in life modelling." More broadly, he believes "there's something tragic and deeply unhealthy in bringing children up in a climate of suspicion and fear".
Despite his outward defiance, Henson appears with his more recent work to have avoided the taboo he broke in 2008 – the budding breast. Henson dismisses this theory: the whole budding breast thing confounds him. "I'm not thinking about that or consciously anticipating the audience when I'm making the work," he says. "There would be a couple [of budding breasts] in the [commercial] exhibitions, but … people are so exhausted from screaming and jumping up and down. They can't be bothered doing it again." He gets up to pour himself another white wine from the fridge.
The National Gallery of Victoria's senior curator of photography, Susan van Wyk, no doubt hopes that there will be no screaming and jumping up and down for her Henson show. She says little can be done about the "preconceptions people bring to what they look at". But a sign will warn gallery-goers there are nudes in the Henson exhibition. Paintings of nudes are, of course, throughout the gallery. Van Wyk asks Henson how old the models are, but he never tells her – it's "personal information", he says. She urges people to see the work in the flesh before judging it. "They are very moving because of their sheer beauty."
When Henson unwraps the parcel stuffed into his letterbox – who can resist a freshly delivered parcel? – it is a gilt-edged, pale-blue 1913 edition of Pierre Louÿs' novel Aphrodite. Set in Alexandria in the first century BC, Aphrodite caused something of a scandal when it was published in 1896 because of some libertine scenes. In the preface, Louÿs rails against the stuffy moralisers of his day. There is "nothing under the sun more sacred", he writes, "than physical love – nothing more beautiful than the human body."
A century later, Henson has a similar message: with our knee-jerk obsession about the vulnerability of children, and our "endless tsunami of trash culture", we've lost sight of what drives art. Henson puts his hands together, his fingers pointed towards me.
"Love is the engine of all great art and the agent of love is always beauty," he says. "We bubble along having clichéd First World problems about where to get the best coffee: it's a giant white-noise convenience store of fluff. So when you see a piece of art that cuts through, it is deeply moving and perhaps upsetting. So I am quite comfortable with the fact that my pictures happen to disturb people."
Bill Henson's new exhibition opens at the National Gallery of Victoria on March 10.