Bill Henson Quotes & Sayings

Most of life is grey, with a little tiny bit of black and white. We're always subject to what I call the compression industry, which is an attempt to compress a million shades of grey with a little bit of black and white to just a hundred, or to ten, or to one! — Bill Henson

You spend your whole life trapped inside your body. Everything you know about the world comes to you through your body. — Bill Henson

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. — Bill Henson

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. — Bill Henson

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. — Bill Henson

It was the dreamscape of the suburbs that interested me. — Bill Henson

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. — Bill Henson

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!" — Bill Henson

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. — Bill Henson

In every form of art, you really want the experience of the images to transcend the medium, for the medium to disappear into the greater experience of viewing the work. So that you forget you are looking at a painting, or a photograph. — Bill Henson

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. — Bill Henson

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. — Bill Henson

There's something about the processional nature of the architecture, of the rooms connecting rooms. It's just breathtaking. — Bill Henson

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! — Bill Henson

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. — Bill Henson

Meaning coming from feeling, feeling coming from within, you absorb a massive amount of information, it goes through your whole body, a little bit of it floats up to your head where there is deliberation. You are conditioned by the way your whole body is responding to what is going on. — Bill Henson

I was always amazed at how beautiful the light was. At different times of the day the landscape becomes a different place. Dawn and dusk, it's a different place. — Bill Henson

There are no inherent limitations to the medium. There are just differences. — Bill Henson

The world is a colony of the US. The twentieth century was the US's century. — Bill Henson

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 ... — Bill Henson

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. — Bill Henson