Beautiful dishevelled young people. Bare skin, sexy angles, tangled limbs, wet mouths, drunken abandon, muddy smears, floating. They look like adults one moment and teenagers the next. Ecstatic in one shot, miserable in others. Troubled or hedonistic, it’s hard to tell.

I’d be happy if I could take one photo that matters, and here are hundreds.

The realisation that I could work at this for fifty years and never achieve anything half as good as these images thumps me in the chest. If you want to feel confident about what you’re doing, don’t look at great art.

I stretch my arms up and out, realising that I’ve been hunched over the books for quite some time. The man in front of me has been replaced by a professor-type in a knitted vest.

The woman to my right is taking careful photos of each letter and envelope, openly, so it must be allowed.

I flick back through the monographs, trying to find the images that have struck me the most, lining up my phone to capture them. I photograph the schoolgirls in hats and the little girl in pearls. The house in the woods. When I land on the city street scene with a solitary Asian face in a white crowd, something dawns on me.

Almost everyone is white.

I turn to my favourite sequence of pictures, the sullen, naughty teens. They look gorgeous and highbred, despite their degradation. Blue veins and pale skin. Tawny hair and red lips. They could be Natalia and some Grammar boys, so easily. They definitely couldn’t be me.

I check again, racing through page after page, finding a world that is overwhelmingly Western and white. This is not what the streets of my town look like.

I wonder why I’ve never noticed this about Henson’s photographs before. Does it make me like the photos any less? How could I like something that ignores my existence? It’s still on my mind as I hand the books back to the librarian at the desk and sign out in the visitor book.

‘Are you interested in contemporary photography?’ the librarian asks. I’m so lost in thought I’m slow to answer.

‘Yeah, I guess. I mean, I’m trying to learn about it. There are so many different styles.’

‘You should speak to my colleague, Chris. They know everything there is to know about our photographic collections. Do you want me to see if they’re around?’

‘I don’t want to bother—’

The librarian waves my protests aside. He makes a quick call then sends me out to the main room, to the info desk. Chris has short purple hair and a septum piercing.

‘So, what exactly are you looking for?’ they say.