Robert Whitaker was a
renowned British photographer, best known internationally for his many
photographs of
The Beatles,
[1] taken between 1964 and 1966, and for his photographs of the rock group
Cream, which were used in the
Martin Sharp-designed collage on the cover of their 1967 LP
Disraeli Gears.
(13 November 1939 – 20 September 2011)
Early life and career
Whitaker was born in
Harpenden,
Hertfordshire,
England
in 1939, but described himself as "one part Aussie lad" since his
father and his grandfather were both Australian. According to Whitaker,
his grandfather built the
Princes Bridge in
Melbourne. Although he has worked mostly in Britain, Australia and Australian connections have featured throughout career.
He began his photographic career in London in the late 1950s but he moved to Melbourne in 1961, where he began studying at the
University of Melbourne and became part of the small but flourishing Melbourne arts scene. According to art historian
David Mellor,
it was Whitaker's three years in Australia that transformed his work as
a photographer. A major influence was undoubtedly his friendship with
two of the leading figures of the Melbourne art world, art dealer,
patron and restuaranteur
Georges Mora and his wife, the painter
Mirka Mora.
Through the Mora family, he came into contact with other major figures in Australian art and letters including
John Reed and
Sunday Reed,
Ian Sime,
Charles Blackman and
Barbara Blackman,
Barrett Reid,
Laurence Hope,
Arthur Boyd,
Sidney Nolan and
Joy Hester, as well as his own peer group including
Martin Sharp,
Richard Neville,
Barry Humphries and
Germaine Greer. Whitaker photographed many of these people including
Georges and
Mirka Mora and their three sons,
Philippe Mora (a noted film director),
William Mora and
Tiriel Mora (a prominent Australian actor).
Whitaker was running a freelance penthouse photo studio in
Flinders Street, Melbourne when he had his fateful meeting with
The Beatles and their manager
Brian Epstein,
during the group's June 1964 Australasian tour. This came about more or
less by accident, when Whitaker accompanied a journalist friend to an
interview with Epstein for an article for the Melbourne
Jewish News.
Whitaker's picture was published with the article, which led to his
introduction to Epstein and his first shots of the Beatles—pictures of
Paul McCartney and
George Harrison each holding up boomerangs presented to them by Australian fans.
- "I photographed Epstein, saw he was a bit of a peacock and a
cavalier, and put peacock feathers around his head in photographic
relief. He was knocked out when he saw the picture. After that, he saw
an exhibition of collages I had at the Museum of Modern Art and
immediately offered me the position of staff photographer at NEMS,
photographing all his artists. I initially turned it down, but after
seeing The Beatles perform at Festival Hall I was overwhelmed by all the
screaming fans and I decided to accept the offer to return to England
".
Whitaker accepted the job three months later, but before he left he
spent one final Sunday at the Aspendale beach house of his friends
Georges and Mirka Mora, taking a set of historic pictures which were
exhibited for the first time in the Monash Gallery of Art's 2003
exhibition of his work. In one photograph, "Aspendale Beach", the Mora
family - Georges, Mirka and their sons Philippe, William and Tiriel -
are pictured in slouched, single file on the beach with Martin Sharp and
architect
Peter Burns.
In another photograph, "Goodbye Bob", the same group sits holding a
sign which reads: "GOD bless thee and keep thee … ASPENDALE 1964".
With The Beatles
On his arrival in England in August 1964, Whitaker set to work photographing the members of the NEMS stable including
Billy J. Kramer & The Dakotas,
Gerry & The Pacemakers (including cover shots for their
How Do You Like It and
Ferry Across The Mersey LPs) and
Cilla Black (including cover shots for the
Cilla and
Cilla Sings A Rainbow LPs). He also did several photographs of the hugely successful Australian folk-pop group
The Seekers, including the cover shots for the LP
Seekers Seen In Green (1967); his Seekers photos were also used for the archival CD
Live At The Talk Of The Town and the
The Seekers Complete boxed set, and a more recent photo of Judith Durham was used on the cover of her 2001 solo CD
Hang On to Your Dream.
But it was with The Beatles and especially
John Lennon,
with whom he became close friends, that Whitaker created his most
famous and enduring work. One of his first assignments was photographing
The Beatles during their triumphant second American tour, including the
historic
Shea Stadium
concert in New York. He spent the next two years travelling with the
Beatles and shooting them at work, at rest and at play—on their tours,
at home, in the recording studio, during private moments, and in formal
photo-sessions. His photos from this period include the portraits that
were used to form the
Klaus Voormann collage-illustration on the cover of the group's landmark 1966 LP
Revolver,
and a series of group portraits taken while the group was making
promotional films for the singles "Rain" and "Paperback Writer" in
Chiswick Park, London in 1966, including the famous "Way Out" portrait of
George Harrison.
With almost unlimited access to the most famous and popular band in
the world, Whitaker quickly became a key figure of the London
underground scene, capturing "the creativity and excess of London in the
sixties". He has been quoted as saying: "There were about 100 people
who ran the Sixties" and he was fortunate enough to meet and photograph
virtually all of them.
Whitaker also accompanied The Beatles on their 1966 tour of Japan. In Tokyo the promoter gave him a
Nikon
21 mm wide-angle lens with which he took numerous shots of The Beatles
relaxing in their hotel room at the Tokyo Hilton. These include several
photographs of the four Beatles at work on a collaborative painting
"Images of A Woman", the only such joint artwork they ever undertook,
and a colour photo of the group inspecting antiques, which was used on
the back cover of the compilation album
A Collection of Beatles Oldies.
The "butcher cover"
Whitaker's most celebrated work is the 1966 photo which was appropriated for The Beatles' infamous
Yesterday and Today album cover, which was briefly released in the
U.S. in 1966 but hastily withdrawn.
On 25 March 1966, The Beatles went to Whitaker’s Chelsea studio for a
photo session, intending to take photos for the cover of (and/or to
promote) their forthcoming single, "Rain"/"Paperback Writer". The band
and their photographer were determined to create something more than the
run-of-the-mill publicity shots, and among the resulting images was one
which has since become known as the "butcher" photo, in which The
Beatles are depicted wearing white coats, draped with dismembered doll
parts, slabs of meat and false teeth.
This now-legendary image was originally conceived as one of a triptych of photographs, and intended as a surreal, satirical
pop art observation on The Beatles’ fame. Whitaker’s inspirations for the images included the work of German surrealist
Hans Bellmer, notably his 1937 book
Die Puppe (
La Poupée). Bellmer’s images of dismembered doll and mannequin parts were first published in the French Surrealist journal
Minotaure in 1934. Whitaker has also cited
Meret Oppenheim as another important influence, notably her most famous surrealist creation
Object (Le Déjeuner en fourrure) (
Lunch In Fur) (1936), a disturbing creation in which she covered a cup, saucer and spoon entirely in fur.
- "It's an apparent switch-around of how you think. Can you imagine
actually drinking out of a fur tea cup? I did a photograph of the
Beatles covered in raw meat, dolls and false teeth. Putting meat, dolls
and false teeth with The Beatles is essentially part of the same thing,
the breakdown of what is regarded as normal. The actual conception for
what I still call "Somnambulant Adventure" was Moses coming down from
Mt. Sinai with the Ten Commandments. He comes across people worshipping a
golden calf. All over the world I'd watched people worshipping like
idols, like gods, four Beatles. To me they were just stock standard
normal people. But this emotion that fans poured on them made me wonder
where Christianity was heading".
It has often been claimed that The Beatles intended the "butcher
cover" as a protest at the way their music was being "butchered" by
their American label,
Capitol Records. In a Nov. 15 1991 interview with
Goldmine magazine, Whitaker discussed the butcher cover at length, and unequivocally put the protest claims to rest:
- "How did that photo, featuring the Beatles among slabs of meat and
decapitated dolls, come about? Was it your idea or the Beatles'?
-
- "It was mine. Absolutely. It was part of three pictures that should
have gone into an icon. And it was a rough. If you could imagine, the
background of that picture should have been all gold. Around the heads
would have gone silver halos, jewelled. Then there are two other
pictures that are in the book [The Unseen Beatles], but not in colour.
- "How did you prepare for the shoot?
-
- "It was hard work. I had to go to the local butcher and get pork. I
had to go to a doll factory and find the dolls. I had to go to an eye
factory and find the eyes. False teeth. There's a lot in that
photograph. I think John's almost-last written words were about that
particular cover; that was pointed out to me by Martin Harrison, who
wrote the text to my book. I didn't even know that, but I'm learning a
lot.
- "Why meat and dolls? There's been a lot of conjecture over the years
about what that photo meant. The most popular theory is that it was a
protest by the Beatles against Capitol Records for supposedly
"butchering" their records in the States.
-
- "Rubbish, absolute nonsense. If the trilogy or triptych of the three
photographs had ever come together, it would have made sense. There is
another set of photos in the book which is the Beatles with a girl with
her back toward you, hanging on to sausages. Those sausages were meant
to be an umbilical cord. Does this start to open a few chapters?
- "Were you aware when you shot it that Capitol Records was going to use it as a record cover?"
-
- "No."
- "Were you upset when they did and then when they pulled it and replaced it with another photo?"
-
- "Well, I shot that photo too, of them sitting on a trunk, the one
that they pasted over it. I fairly remember being bewildered by the
whole thing. I had no reason to be bewildered by it, purely and simply,
because it could certainly be construed as a fairly shocking collection
of bits and pieces to stick on a group of people and represent that in
this country.
Quoted in 1966 in the British music magazine
Disc and Music Echo, Whitaker said:
- "I wanted to do a real experiment - people will jump to wrong
conclusions about it being sick, but the whole thing is based on
simplicity -- linking four very real people with something real. I got
George to knock some nails into John’s head, and took some sausages
along to get some other pictures, dressed them up in white smocks as
butchers, and this is the result -- the use of the camera as a means of
creating situations."
Whitaker was later quoted as saying that the basic motivation for making
A Somnambulant Adventure
came from the fact that he and The Beatles were "really fed up at
taking what one had hoped would be designer-friendly publicity
pictures". In the interview conducted just before his death in 1980
(referred to by Bob), John Lennon confirmed this.
- John Lennon - "It was inspired by our boredom and resentment
at having to do another photo session and another Beatles thing. We were
sick to death of it. Bob was into Dali and making surreal pictures."
Whitaker had intended the triptych to be his "personal comment on the
mass adulation of the group and the illusory nature of stardom … I had
toured quite a lot of the world with them by then, and I was continually
amused by the public adulation of four people".
The images in the triptych were actually intended as the foundation
of a much more elaborate work. He had planned to retouch the photos to
give them the appearance of a religious icon. The background was to be
painted gold like a Russian
icon
and to have the Fab Four’s heads surrounded by jewelled halos, with the
photos bordered in rainbow colours. This decoration, contrasted with
the bizarre situations of the photos themselves, was evidently intended
to create a surreal juxtaposition between the band's image and
celebrity, and the underlying fact that they were just as real and human
as everyone else.
- "John played with all sorts of bits and pieces before we actually
did the picture. I did a few outtake pictures which were of them
actually playing with a box full of dolls which they pulled out and
stuck all over themselves. There was an enormous amount of laughter.
There was even George Harrison banging nails into John's head with a
hammer. The actual conception of what is termed the ‘Butcher's Sleeve’
is a reasonably diverse piece of thinking ..."
- " ... the [butcher] cover was an unfinished concept. It was just one
of a series of photographs that would have made up a gate-fold cover.
Behind the head of each Beatle would have been a golden halo and in the
halo would have been placed a semi-precious stone. Then the background
would have contained more gold, so it was rather like a Russian icon. It
was just after John Lennon had said that the Beatles were more popular
than Jesus Christ. In a material world that was an extremely true
statement."
The first photo shows The Beatles facing a woman who stands with her
back to the camera, her hands raised as if in surprise (or worship)
while The Beatles hold a string of sausages. This was meant to represent
the 'birth' of the Beatles, with the sausages serving as an umbilical
cord. Whitaker explained: "My own thought was how the hell do you show
that they've been born out of a woman the same as anybody else? An
umbilical cord was one way of doing it."
The centre panel of the triptych is the image nowadays referred to as
the "butcher" photo. It shows the (possibly stoned) Beatles dressed in
butchers’ coats, draped with slabs of red meat, false teeth, glass eyes
and dismembered doll parts. This picture was actually titled "A
Somnambulant Adventure" and Bob’s intention was to add other elements to
it which would create a jarring juxtaposition between idolisation of
The Beatles' as gods of the pop world and their flesh and blood reality
as ordinary human beings, but he was never able to realise this.
The photograph that would have been used for the right-hand panel of
the triptych is one of George Harrison standing behind a seated John
Lennon, hammer in hand, apparently driving nails into John's head.
Whitaker explained that this picture was intended to demonstrate that
the Beatles were not an illusion, not something to be worshipped, but
people as real and substantial as "a piece of wood".
A fourth picture taken at the same session, but apparently not
intended to be part of the triptych, is also included in Whitaker’s book
The Unseen Beatles. It shows John framing Ringo's head with a cardboard box, on one of the flaps of which is written "2,000,000".
- "I wanted to illustrate that, in a way, there was nothing more
amazing about Ringo than anyone else on this earth. In this life he was
just one of two million members of the human race. The idolization of
fans reminded me of the story of the worship of the golden calf."
Like the famous 1963 nude photo of
Christine Keeler taken by his contemporary
Lewis Morley,
Whitaker's "butcher" photo soon passed out of his control and took on a
life of its own. The Beatles themselves seem to have been behind the
use of the photo in British trade advertisements and then on the cover
of the Capitol album
Yesterday and Today. The prime mover seems to have been
Paul McCartney. In his book
Shout, Beatles biographer
Philip Norman
claims that Brian Epstein had misgivings about the picture and felt it
would disrupt the band’s meticulously managed image, which had taken a
hammering in the wake of the recent "bigger than Jesus" controversy. But
according to Norman, the band overruled him.
Interestingly, the butcher photo made three appearances in print in the UK before it was released in the USA on the cover of
Yesterday And Today. It was first published on page 2 of
New Musical Express on 3 June 1966' in an EMI advertisement promoting the forthcoming single. The same ad was published in
Disc and Music Echo
the next day, June 4. Both these versions were in B&W. Its third
appearance (and its first in colour) was on the front page of
Disc and Music Echo on 11 June 1966 under the headline, "BEATLES: WHAT A CARVE-UP!"
It can also reportedly be glimpsed in photos taken during the making
of the "Rain" and "Paperback Writer" film-clips, filmed on 19 May, in
which Paul McCartney can be seen inspecting transparencies from the 25
March photo session. None of these appearances seem to have caused any
appreciable comment in the UK, even though they were published only days
before Capitol’s promotional release of
Yesterday And Today in th U.S.
The Yesterday and Today controversy
Up to and including the
Revolver album, all The Beatles' American Capitol albums differed markedly from their original
EMI
UK releases. The American albums were compilations of tracks culled
from the Beatles' previously-released British albums and singles,
selected and packaged by Capitol especially for the American market.
Yesterday and Today included songs from the earlier
Help! and
Rubber Soul LPs plus, unusually, three songs from
Revolver,
which would not be released in Britain for another three weeks. It was
Capitol’s habit of cherry-picking album tracks and singles to compile
their own albums that was the origin of the urban myth (referred to
above) about the butcher cover being some kind of protest against the
American label.
Capitol printed the cover in early June, using the "butcher" photo,
and the release was scheduled for 15 June 1966. Estimates of how many
copies of the album were printed and/or distributed vary considerably.
Whitaker put the number at 250,000, but other sources range from as high
as 750,000 to 400,000 to as low as 60,000. According to another
estimate, about 25,000 copies were sold prior to the recall.
Mojo magazine reported that 60,000 copies were distributed to radio, media and Capitol branch offices, who showed it to retailers.
- "Having finished that particular picture, it was snatched away from
me and sent off to America. It was reproduced as a record cover without
ever having the artwork completed by me. The cover layout was somebody
else's conception. It was a good idea to ban it at the time, because it
made no sense at all. It was just this rather horrific image of four
Beatles, whom everybody loved, covered in raw meat, the arms, legs and
torsos of dolls, and false teeth. But they are only objects placed on
the Beatles, rather like making a movie. I mean what you want to read
into it is entirely up to you. I was trying to show that the Beatles
were flesh and blood."
It has been suggested that Lennon was the main impetus behind the
photo being used, but according to Alan Livingstone, Capitol’s former
president, (quoted in Mojo magazine in 2002), the decision to use the
photo
Yesterday And Today was mainly at the insistence of Paul McCartney:
- Alan Livingston - "The reaction came back that the dealers
refused to handle them. I called London and we went back and forth. My
contact was mainly with Paul McCartney. He was adamant and felt very
strongly that we should go forward. He said 'It's our comment on the
war'. I don’t know why it was a comment on the war or if it would be
interpreted that way."
Capitol were understandably touchy and could ill afford another
Beatles-related controversy—they were still reeling from the
public-relations disaster of John Lennon’s notorious "bigger than Jesus"
comment in March that year, which had sparked a wave of protests and
record burnings in conservative areas of the U.S. The company reacted
swiftly, issuing letters of apology, and on Tuesday 14 June PR manager
Ron Tepper issued an official letter of recall in which he quoted a
statement from Capitol’s President Alan W. Livingston:
- "The original cover, created in England, was intended as a ‘pop art'
satire. However a sampling of public opinion in the United States
indicates that the cover design is subject to misinterpretation. For
this reason, and to avoid any possible controversy or undeserved harm to
the Beatles' image or reputation, Capitol has chosen to withdraw the LP
and substitute a more generally acceptable design."
The albums with the butcher cover were withdrawn and returned, and a
new cover was hastily prepared at a reported cost of $250,000. The
offending photo was replaced by an unremarkable Whitaker shot of the
Beatles gathered around a large steamer trunk, taken in Brian Epstein’s
office. It was rushed to America, where Capitol staff spent the
following weekend taking the discs from the returned "butcher" sleeves
and putting them in the new sleeve.
Several thousand copies of the original cover were destroyed and
replaced by the "cabin trunk" sleeve, but Capitol eventually decided
that it would be more economical to simply paste the new cover photo
over the old one. After the album was released, news of the paste-over
operation leaked out, and Beatle fans across America began steaming the
cabin trunk photos off of their copies of
Yesterday And Today in the hope of finding the "butcher" cover underneath.
The butcher cover is now one of the most valuable and sought-after
pieces of Beatle memorabilia. George Harrison himself called it "the
definitive Beatles collectible" and Whitaker relates the story of a
woman who came up to him with an unpeeled ‘paste-over’ cover in the
U.S., had him autograph it, and then promptly sold it for US$40,000.
The scarcest copies of
Yesterday And Today are the so-called
"first state" versions, those still in their original shrink-wrapping,
and the rarest and most valuable of these are the stereo pressings.
Prior to 1987, there were only two sealed stereo copies and about six
mono copies known to exist. Then, on Thanksgiving weekend 1987 at the
Los Angeles Beatlefest convention, Peter Livingston, son of 1960's
Capitol Records President Alan Livingston, walked into the Beatlefest
dealer room at the show carrying a box of original first-state butcher
cover albums. Nearly every copy was sealed and in mint condition.
It transpired that, after the recall in 1966, Alan Livingston had
taken home a full box of the albums (five stereo and about twenty mono
copies) from the inventory that was to have the new cover pasted over
it. Stored in a cupboard under perfect conditions in the Livington's
home, the albums lay untouched for twenty-one years.
At the convention, a canny collector instantly negotiated a purchase
for one of the two stereo copies for US$2500 and a crowd quickly grew as
word spread. The asking price for the mono copies was US$1000 and
within a matter of minutes, the ten mono and two stereo copies were
sold. Some of these copies were resold during the show for even higher
sums; just one week later the prices had climbed to US$2000 for mono
copies and US$10,000 for the stereo.
Over the next few months, under pressure from collectors, Peter
Livingston slowly sold the remaining mono copies, by which time the
price for these copies had risen to US$3000. Since then the price of
mono copies has risen to over $5000. In the early 1990s the best of the
four of the four sealed stereo Livingston copies sold to a US collector
for $20,000 cash, a world-record price. In 1994 this was sold on to a
California collector for US$25,000.
Disraeli Gears and Oz
In late 1966 The Beatles withdrew from touring and during the first half of 1967 they were ensconced in Abbey Rd working on
Sgt Pepper's Lonely Hearts Club Band. With the demands of touring now over, Whitaker’s association with The Beatles and NEMS came to an end.
By this time he was living and working in a residential studio space
which he called Joubert Studios, located in the well-known building
called
The Pheasantry in
King's Rd, Chelsea. This venerable artists' colony was also home to friends from Australia—Martin Sharp, Philippe Mora and Germaine Greer.
- Martin Sharp: "Bob setting to work with The Beatles was a
real breakthrough. When Richard Neville and I left for England, Bob was
on the TOP or my list of people to contact."}
Whitaker's next major project, and one of his most famous
collaborations, was created with Sharp—the classic psychedelic album
cover for
Cream's landmark 1967 LP
Disraeli Gears:
- "Cream were going to do a tour of the north of England and Scotland.
I just jumped in a car. Various things presented themselves to us on
our journey around Scotland, none of which I could have recreated in a
studio. I was very lucky that Martin had discovered day-glo paint. I had
all the pictures, which I knew were for some form of publicity. I made a
whole series of colour prints and Martin just started cutting them up -
much to my annoyance, because they weren't cheap to do. He then laid
them out on a 12-inch square as a piece of finished artwork and then
painted all over it."
Whitaker's friendship with Sharp and Greer also led to him becoming closely involved with
Oz
magazine in 1967-68, and he contributed to many of the early editions
of the famous underground magazine, including a famous collage depicting
a woman seated on a flying toilet symbolically defecating on the Houses
of Parliament.
Later career
Over the next few years Whitaker gradually moved away from the pop
scene and back to the art world, where he had begun his photographic
career. One of his most famous subjects from this period was a longtime
hero, the doyen of surrealism,
Salvador DalÃ,
whom he photographed several times between 1967 and 1972. He first met
Dalà at his Spanish mansion and told him that he wanted to use his
camera "to get inside his head".
Whitaker: "I said: 'I'll photograph inside every hole I can find'. I
started by photographing his ears, then inside his mouth and up his
nose."
The photos he took include three extreme close-ups of DalÃ, plus one
of Whitaker's wife Susie basking topless under the Spanish sun alongside
the artist. The extreme close-ups were the first steps towards a
photographic style that he finally developed fully in the 1990s, a
concept he called the "Whitograph", shooting extreme close-ups with all
36 exposures of a roll of film to create a single portrait.
In 1969 he photographed Mick Jagger (who nicknamed him "Super Click") during the production of
Nicolas Roeg’s
Performance and he accompanied Jagger to Australia to photograph him on location during the filming of
Ned Kelly. These images were published in book form as the 1970 under the title
Mick Jagger Is Ned Kelly.
Whitaker also worked as a photojournalist, covering major world events for
Time and
Life
magazines, and his assignments included the devastating Florence
floods, the war in Cambodia and Vietnam and the bloody war of
independence in Bangladesh. One of the most famous photographs from this
period, "Bangladesh" (1971) depicts two dead soldiers near the Indian
border, lying in golden sunlight, as if asleep.
In the early Seventies, Whitaker effectively retired from photography
and for almost twenty years he farmed his property in Sussex. In 1991
he gathered some of his previously unpublished photographs of The
Beatles for his successful book
The Unseen Beatles. Many more
negatives apparently still await retrieval from his barn. The book was
very successful and was followed by a touring exhibition of his
photographs from the 1960s, "Underground London", which included
photographs of the individual Beatles as well as many previously unseen
shots from the "butcher cover" session. The exhibition visited The
National Gallery of Victoria in 1998, before heading to America for a two-year tour there.
For many years, Whitaker fought an ongoing battle with
Apple Corps
over ownership of the rights to the "butcher cover" photo. Apple told
him they do not want the image reproduced as a book cover, postcard,
poster, "virtually in no form whatsoever", a move which so angered
Whitaker that he considered making an enormous print of it for his
Underground London exhibition and putting it behind closed doors so that
people would have to file in one at a time.
Apple Corps has its own photo library which manages the use of
copyright Beatle material around the world. When asked for his opinion
on the situation,
Derek Taylor,
Apple Corps' long-serving press boss, was quoted as saying that "the
person who might know who has the actual copyright to the ‘Butcher's
Sleeve’ picture is not yet born." Taylor felt that, because Whitaker was
employed by Epstein and NEMS at the time he took the picture, this gave
Apple the legal copyright, although he recognised that it was Whitaker
"who took the picture, who thought of the idea, and that would give him a
proprietary moral right." Taylor added that although he never
personally enjoyed the picture "it has its place in history as part of
their story. As a piece of Beatles' art it has its place on the wall."
Taylor also claimed that "George still doesn't like it." (reportedly
because Harrison subsequently became a vegetarian). But Taylor
reportedly believed that the banning of the cover was a mistake and
finds its replacement less innocuous than it seems. "I mean, which is
worse, Beatles with meat all over them, or four Beatles in a trunk in a
hotel room. If you really think about it what would they be doing in a
trunk"?
Whitaker concurs: "I made that dumb-ass photo of the Beatles with the
trunk in Brian Epstein’s office when we were all in Argyll Street, next
door to the
London Palladium.
Derek is right. It was far more stupid than anything else I could think
of. The trunk was to hand in the office, so I thought that by putting
the light meter in the picture it might convey an idea of the speed of
light running so fast that it shot straight back up your arse. It was
just to see what could become a record cover ".
In the mid-1990s Apple Managing Director,
Neil Aspinall began negotiations with Whitaker for the use of 300 of his images of the Beatles in the television documentary,
The Beatles Anthology, but it proved to be a short-lived rapprochement:
Whitaker: "On one day Neil Aspinall is offering me £80,000 for the
use of my pictures in his Anthology of the Beatles, chatting about their
past around the table of an English pub. The next day Aspinall phones
to say that he thinks I should give the Anthology all the pictures for
nothing, having spent six months deciding which images should be
reprinted, retouched and repaired. We, the Beatles, own Whitaker's life.
Needless to say, they got nothing."
In 1997 Melbourne’s Gallery 101 mounted a world-premiere exhibition
of Robert’s photographs of Mick Jagger, taken during the production of
Ned Kelly.
In February–March 2002 Whitaker's photos of George Harrison featured
as part of a photographic tribute to George staged at the Govinda
Galleries in Washington. In November 2002 Bob returned to Australia to
open a new 40th anniversary retrospective of his work entitled
"Yesterday & and Today: The Photography of Robert Whitaker
1962-2002", staged at the Monash Gallery of Art in Melbourne which ran
from 30 November 2002 to 26 January 2003.
It included many previously unseen images from Whitaker’s early days
in Australia, through his European work with the Beatles, Cream, The
Seekers, Robert Hughes, Man Ray, Salvador Dalà and Peggy Guggenheim, to
his later work with Australian artists such as Stelarc, Bruce Armstrong,
and Howard Arkley.
In recent years Whitaker had been compiling a digital archive of his
work. In 2002 his photographs of The Seekers were chosen for a special
commemorative Australia Post stamp issue
[1] to commemorate the group’s 40th anniversary.
He died on 20 September 2011 following a long illness aged 71. He left a widow and three children.
To see more of who died in 2011
click here
