Bill Henson has a new show at the Roslyn Oxley9 in Paddington Sydney. From all counts the current exhibition builds on his earlier work: classical architectural ruins, romantic landscapes and sultry, pubescent girls and boys.

I'm mostly interested in the way that he handles ruins and statues in his twilight world. It is represented almost as an underworld in which we stumble about only dimly aware of what is going on but sensing the terror.

Henson's perspective is that of Romanticism, understood as rejecting the the rationality of an Enlightenment civilisation and yearning for an emphasis on the role of feeling, upon emotion, and upon imagination in the process of artistic creation. The Romantic artist shows us the way they imagine the world should be, how it might reflect the way we feel about the world rather than the mundane way it actually is. In Henson's imaginative world we have teenagers as primitives amidst ruined temples that express the inevitable decay and collapse of human creations.

In this poetic landscape we experience the melancholy overtones of classic ruins crumbling into decay ad being overrun by nature. In Henson's photographs we have heritage ruins rather than modern ruins of derelict factories, closed shopping malls, overgrown bunkers and redundant mining towns; a ghostly world of decaying modern debris normally left out of academic concerns and conventional histories.

In the former extraneous materials – plants, fauna, debris, modern materials – all pollutants, are to be expunged. Seemingly frozen in time, further decay is staved off through restoration and preservation. Arresting decay, of course, has always been the imperative of modern museums and heritage management. Modern ruins,