Robert Ashton (1950) is an Australian photographer and photojournalist.

Early life and education

Robert Ashton was born on August 11, 1950 in

Melbourne Melbourne ( ; Boonwurrung/Woiwurrung: ''Narrm'' or ''Naarm'') is the capital and most populous city of the Australian state of Victoria, and the second-most populous city in both Australia and Oceania. Its name generally refers to a met ...

. He studied Photography at

Prahran College The Prahran College of Advanced Education, formerly Prahran College of Technology, was a late-secondary and tertiary institution with a business school, a trade school, and a multi-disciplinary art school that dated back to the 1860s, populated ...

1969-71 and graduated with a Diploma of Visual Arts and Design.

Career

In the early 1970s, Robert Ashton shared house with Carol Jerrems and Ian Macrae in Mozart Street, St Kilda, their artist associates being Ingeborg Tyssen, Paul Cox and Bill Heimerman, and Ashton's cousin

Rennie Ellis Reynolds Mark Ellis (11 November 194019 August 2003) was an Australian social and social documentary photographer. He also worked, at various stages of his life, as an advertising copywriter, seaman, lecturer, television presenter and founder of ...

with whom he shared a studio in Greville Street,

Prahran Prahran (), also pronounced colloquially as Pran, is an inner suburb in Melbourne, Victoria (Australia), Victoria, Australia, 5 km south-east of Melbourne's Melbourne central business district, Central Business District, located within the City ...

. From 1974 to 1981, Ashton was assistant director at Ellis's

Brummels Gallery Brummels Gallery in South Yarra, Melbourne, Australia, was a commercial gallery established by David Yencken in 1956 to exhibit contemporary Modernist Australian painting, sculpture and prints, but after a period of dormancy became best known in ...

in Toorak Road,

South Yarra South Yarra is an inner-city suburb in Melbourne, Victoria, Australia, 4 km south-east of Melbourne's Central Business District, located within the Cities of Melbourne and Stonnington local government areas. South Yarra recorded a popul ...

, where he also exhibited. Photography curator Judy Annear notes that; His subject matter includes urban indigenous, life and incidents in inner suburbia in Melbourne, particularly Fitzroy. Writer and musician Mark Gillespie, who had become involved in a new publishing venture, Outback Press, with Fred Milgrom Colin Talbot and Morry Schwartz, commissioned Ashton for the book ''Into the Hollow Mountain.'' Its images, of "kids on the prowl, the old Salvo street bands, the Koorie clans, the card joint ''kaphenois''", were first shown at Brummels in a exhibition of that title in 1974, and when re-exhibited forty years later at Colour Factory, "serve as a rare documentation of day-to-day Melbourne and glimpse into an era that, while not actually all that distant, is most definitely a thing of the past." Ashton has published several other books, of portraits and close-up, abstracted landscape, and exhibited widely in Australia. His photograph ''Bernard Diving'' featured in the 1988 exhibition, and on the cover its catalogue, ''The Thousand Mile Stare'', a survey of Australian photography published by the Victorian Centre for Photography. In pursuing the best quality output for his imagery, Ashton adopted, and currently uses, hand-built large format cameras and advanced printing techniques including

photogravure Photogravure (in French ''héliogravure'') is a process for printing photographs, also sometimes used for reproductive intaglio printmaking. It is a photo-mechanical process whereby a copper plate is grained (adding a pattern to the plate) and ...

and the

Collodion process The collodion process is an early photographic process. The collodion process, mostly synonymous with the "collodion wet plate process", requires the photographic material to be coated, sensitized, exposed, and developed within the span of about ...

. He lives on Victoria's Surf Coast, and imagery of the ocean and landscape is a consistent interest.

Exhibitions

Solo

* 1973 ''Faces and Places'',

, Melbourne * 1974 ''Into the Hollow Mountains: A Portrait of Fitzroy'', Brummels Gallery * 1976 ''Between Light and Dark'', Australian Centre for Photography, Sydney * 1976 ''Between Light and Dark'', Brummels Gallery, Melbourne * 1979 ''Adventures in Paradise?'' Church Street Photographic Centre, Melbourne * 1987 ''Adventures in Paradise?'', Australian Centre for Photography, Sydney. * 1990 ''Photogravure Images'', United Artists Gallery, Melbourne. * 1993 ''What are you Doing? What are you Saying?'', Luba Bilu Gallery, Melbourne * 2000 ''Hidden Things'', Qdos Gallery, Lorne * 2001 ''Life Sanctuary'', Patricia Autore Gallery, Melbourne * 2003 ''Different Dreams-Same Reality'', Patricia Autore Gallery, Melbourne * 2005 ''Evidence'', Little Malop Gallery, Geelong * 2006 ''Visual Instinct'', Libby Edwards Gallery - Melbourne * 2007 ''Recognition'', Pigment Gallery, Prague * 2009 ''Snapshots from the edge'', Qdos Gallery, Lorne * 2009 ''Photographs from the edge'',

Monash Gallery of Art The City of Monash is a local government area in Melbourne, Victoria, Australia in the south-eastern suburbs of Melbourne with an area of 81.5 square kilometres and a population of 200,077 people in 2016. Demographics Monash has a diverse pop ...

* 2012 ''Postmortem'', Edmund Pearce Gallery, Melbourne * 2013 ''Interior/Exterior'', Edmund Pearce Gallery, Melbourne * 2014 ''Into The Hollow Mountains'', Colour Factory Gallery, Melbourne * 2014 ''Interior/Exterior'' + ''Postmortem gravures'', Black Eye Gallery, Sydney * 2015 ''Thin Air'', Qdos Gallery, Lorne * 2015, 6 Aug - 29 Aug; ''Thin Air'', Colour Factory Gallery, 409-429 Gore St, Fitzroy * 2021, 3–25 Apr, ''Bush Theatre'', Qdos Gallery, Lorne

Group

* 1982 Ray Hughes Gallery, Brisbane. * 1988 ''The Thousand Mile Stare'', Victorian Centre for Photography * 1988 Artery Gallery, Geelong. * 1990 Qdos Gallery, Lorne. 1990 * 1991 ''Special . . . It's Been Used Before'', Luba Bilu Gallery. * 1991 ''Survey - A Regional Review'',

Geelong Art Gallery The Geelong Art Gallery, currently known as Geelong Gallery, is a major regional art gallery, gallery in the city of Geelong, Victoria, Geelong in Victoria (Australia), Victoria, Australia. The gallery has over 6,000 works of art in its collectio ...

. * 1998 ''Waterproof'', Centro Cultural de Belem, Lisbon Portugal. * 2003 ''Australian Photographic Portrait Prize'', Art Gallery of NSW. * 2007 ''Ulrich and Schubert Photography award'', Gold Coast City Art Gallery * 2007 ''Bowness Photography prize'', Monash Gallery of Art. * 2010 ''Bowness Photography prize 2010'', Monash Gallery of Art. * 2011 ''Ulrich and Schubert Photography award'', Gold Coast City Art Gallery. * 2020, 31 October 2020 – 7 February 2021
Bowness Photography prize 2020
', Monash Gallery of Art.

Collections

* Hallmark Cards Collection,

National Gallery of Australia The National Gallery of Australia (NGA), formerly the Australian National Gallery, is the national art museum of Australia as well as one of the largest art museums in Australia, holding more than 166,000 works of art. Located in Canberra in th ...

National Gallery of Victoria The National Gallery of Victoria, popularly known as the NGV, is an art museum in Melbourne, Victoria, Australia. Founded in 1861, it is Australia's oldest and most visited art museum. The NGV houses an encyclopedic art collection across two ...

* Phillip Morris Collection, Australian National Gallery * Art Gallery of New South Wales * Tasmanian Museum and Art Gallery * John Sands Collection * Charles Darwin University

Publications

* * * * * * * * *

References

{{DEFAULTSORT:Ashton, Robert 1950 births 20th-century Australian photographers Australian curators Living people Photographers from Melbourne 21st-century Australian photographers