Matt Henry
Ten years after his first exhibition at the gallery, Matt Henry returns to Polka with “Palm,” a series built around the figure of the palm tree. The 48-year-old Welsh photographer seeks to pay tribute to the symbolic power of this giant tropical plant, in the botanical sense, while turning it into the instrument of a striking socio-political analysis.
A hundred years after the first journeys of explorer-photographers around the Mediterranean—where palm trees fed an entire imagined fantasy world—they re-emerge in the 1960s as revisited by Matt Henry. The Orientalist adventures are already far behind. An industrial revolution and two world wars have passed in the meantime. Photography is reborn in color, and Kodak enters every household. The palm tree, that old companion once symbolizing sublime exoticism and shaped by fantasies of tropical abundance, resurfaces in the triumphant imagination of the post–Second World War era, this time at the very heart of the Western world.
Fascinated by American culture and counterculture of the 1960s and 1970s, Matt Henry has spent the past ten years creating photographic “short stories,” fictional narratives told through images. “Palm” brings together three of these stories in a kind of photographic essay in which the palm tree serves as an analytical prism.
“I try to decipher its symbolism at a time when it has above all become synonymous with opulence and leisure,” notes Matt Henry. This is the thread running through the first story in his book, set in Palm Springs, that modernist suburban mirage on America’s West Coast, just outside Los Angeles. Beneath the palm fronds lies an American dream: a sun-drenched life of endless opportunities, vast houses with Olympic-sized swimming pools, and chlorophyll-green lawns in neighborhoods too perfect to be real. The photographer — who readily cites John Waters and David Lynch as influences — portrays the city and the simmering unrest of its inhabitants with a filmmaker’s eye.
“I see myself as a storyteller. Above all, I try to immerse the viewer in the universe I create. The worlds I build are imaginary times and places; distorted fragments of memory and myth.” The palm tree becomes the emblem of a fictional world shaped by rampant consumer culture, the commodification of leisure, and the domestication of nature. But it also serves as a totem guiding the following chapters: confronting the devastation of the Vietnam War and the looming culture wars, or traveling along the “hippie trail” beside a new breed of adventurers eager for inner exploration and collective experiences shared on lush beaches lined with coconut palms.
The “scenes” staged by Matt Henry embrace an openly camp — even kitsch — theatricality: flamboyant, whimsical, if not outright satirical. This deliberate aesthetic, poised between entertainment and subversive wink, draws its roots from the popular culture of the 1960s. “Today’s era is marked by deeply binary thinking. Photography is no exception. I do not wish to deny the importance of documentary work, nor of art as manifesto, but understanding their limits also means realizing that there is room for playful, satirical, or absurd works,” the photographer adds. Before concluding: “The 1960s still leave me with a sense of unfinished business. We were on the verge of achieving something, and then everything was swept under the rug. In a way, I see myself as a kind of Sisyphus: endlessly returning to and pushing forward the subjects and motifs that obsess me, within a world I have created for the occasion.”
Alongside his exhibition at the Polka gallery, Matt Henry has compiled this series into a self-titled book published by Sturm & Drang. 136 pages, €75. Available at Factory Polka.
