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Robert Whitaker (photographer)
Encyclopedia
Robert Whitaker was a renowned British photographer, best known internationally for his many photographs of The Beatles
, 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
.
, 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.
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".
(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
.
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 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:
Quoted in 1966 in the British music magazine Disc and Music Echo, Whitaker said:
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.
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.
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".
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.
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, four 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.
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:
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 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.
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.
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
:
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.
, whom he photographed several times between 1967 and 1972. He first met Dalí 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 Dalí, 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 Dalí 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 http://www.auspost.com.au/philatelic/stamps/index.asp?link_id=1.645 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.
The Beatles
The Beatles were an English rock band, active throughout the 1960s and one of the most commercially successful and critically acclaimed acts in the history of popular music. Formed in Liverpool, by 1962 the group consisted of John Lennon , Paul McCartney , George Harrison and Ringo Starr...
, taken between 1964 and 1966, and for his photographs of the rock group Cream
Cream (band)
Cream were a 1960s British rock supergroup consisting of bassist/vocalist Jack Bruce, guitarist/vocalist Eric Clapton, and drummer Ginger Baker...
, which were used in the Martin Sharp
Martin Sharp
Martin Sharp is an Australian artist, underground cartoonist, songwriter and film-maker. Sharp has made contributions to Australian and international culture since the early 60s, and is hailed as Australia's foremost pop artist...
-designed collage on the cover of their 1967 LP Disraeli Gears
Disraeli Gears
Disraeli Gears is the second album by British supergroup Cream. It was released in November 1967 and went on to reach #5 on the UK Albums Chart. It was also their American breakthrough, becoming a massive seller there in 1968, reaching #4 on the American charts...
.
Early life and career
Whitaker was born in HarpendenHarpenden
Harpenden is a town in Hertfordshire, England.The town's total population is just under 30,000.-Geography and administration:There are two civil parishes: Harpenden and Harpenden Rural....
, Hertfordshire
Hertfordshire
Hertfordshire is a ceremonial and non-metropolitan county in the East region of England. The county town is Hertford.The county is one of the Home Counties and lies inland, bordered by Greater London , Buckinghamshire , Bedfordshire , Cambridgeshire and...
, England
England
England is a country that is part of the United Kingdom. It shares land borders with Scotland to the north and Wales to the west; the Irish Sea is to the north west, the Celtic Sea to the south west, with the North Sea to the east and the English Channel to the south separating it from continental...
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
Princes Bridge
Princes Bridge may refer to:* Princes Bridge, in Melbourne over the Yarra River* Princes Bridge railway station, Melbourne* Princes Bridge, over the Barwon River in Victoria...
in Melbourne
Melbourne
Melbourne is the capital and most populous city in the state of Victoria, and the second most populous city in Australia. The Melbourne City Centre is the hub of the greater metropolitan area and the Census statistical division—of which "Melbourne" is the common name. As of June 2009, the greater...
. 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
University of Melbourne
The University of Melbourne is a public university located in Melbourne, Victoria. Founded in 1853, it is the second oldest university in Australia and the oldest in Victoria...
and became part of the small but flourishing Melbourne arts scene. According to art historian David Mellor
David Mellor
David John Mellor, QC is a British politician, non-practising barrister, broadcaster, journalist and football pundit. A member of the Conservative Party, he served in the Cabinet of Prime Minister John Major as Chief Secretary to the Treasury and Secretary of State for National Heritage , before...
, 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
Georges Mora
Georges Mora was a German-born Australian entrepreneur, art dealer, patron, connoisseur and restaurateur.- Early life :Mora was born Gunter Morawski in 1913 in Leipzig, Germany of Jewish/Polish heritage. As a young medical student Mora became a member of a communist cell and fled Germany to Paris...
and his wife, the painter Mirka Mora
Mirka Mora
Mirka Mora is a prominent French-born Australian Visual artist who has contributed significantly to the development of Contemporary Art in Australia. Her mediums include painting, sculpture and mosaics.- Early life :...
.
Through the Mora family, he came into contact with other major figures in Australian art and letters including John Reed
John Reed (art patron)
John Reed was an Australian art editor and patron, notable for supporting and collecting of Australian art and culture with his wife Sunday Reed....
and Sunday Reed
Sunday Reed
Sunday Reed was notable for supporting and collecting Australian art with her husband John Reed.-Personal history:...
, Ian Sime, Charles Blackman
Charles Blackman
Charles Blackman is one of the best known Australian artists still living today, especially for the famous Schoolgirl and Alice in Wonderland series of the 1950s...
and Barbara Blackman, Barrett Reid, Laurence Hope
Laurence Hope (artist)
Laurence Hope is an Australian artist from Sydney who is best known for his Lover, Dreamers and Isolates paintings.-Early years:...
, Arthur Boyd
Arthur Boyd
Arthur Merric Bloomfield Boyd, AC, OBE was one of the leading Australian painters of the late 20th Century. A member of the prominent Boyd artistic dynasty in Australia, his relatives included painters, sculptors, architects or other arts professionals. His sister Mary Boyd married John Perceval,...
, Sidney Nolan
Sidney Nolan
Sir Sidney Robert Nolan OM, AC was one of Australia's best-known painters and printmakers.-Early life:Nolan was born in Carlton, a suburb of Melbourne, on 22 April 1917. He was the eldest of four children. His family later moved to St Kilda. Nolan attended the Brighton Road State School and...
and Joy Hester
Joy Hester
Joy St Clair Hester was an Australian artist who played an important, though sometimes underrated, role in the development of Australian modernism, though her works could also be considered Abstract Expressionism....
, as well as his own peer group including Martin Sharp
Martin Sharp
Martin Sharp is an Australian artist, underground cartoonist, songwriter and film-maker. Sharp has made contributions to Australian and international culture since the early 60s, and is hailed as Australia's foremost pop artist...
, Richard Neville
Richard Neville (writer)
Richard Neville is an Australian author and self-described "futurist", who came to fame as a co-editor of the counterculture magazine Oz in Australia and the United Kingdom in the 1960s and early 1970s...
, Barry Humphries
Barry Humphries
John Barry Humphries, AO, CBE is an Australian comedian, satirist, dadaist, artist, author and character actor, best known for his on-stage and television alter egos Dame Edna Everage, a Melbourne housewife and "gigastar", and Sir Les Patterson, Australia's foul-mouthed cultural attaché to the...
and Germaine Greer
Germaine Greer
Germaine Greer is an Australian writer, academic, journalist and scholar of early modern English literature, widely regarded as one of the most significant feminist voices of the later 20th century....
. Whitaker photographed many of these people including Georges
Georges Mora
Georges Mora was a German-born Australian entrepreneur, art dealer, patron, connoisseur and restaurateur.- Early life :Mora was born Gunter Morawski in 1913 in Leipzig, Germany of Jewish/Polish heritage. As a young medical student Mora became a member of a communist cell and fled Germany to Paris...
and Mirka Mora
Mirka Mora
Mirka Mora is a prominent French-born Australian Visual artist who has contributed significantly to the development of Contemporary Art in Australia. Her mediums include painting, sculpture and mosaics.- Early life :...
and their three sons, Philippe Mora
Philippe Mora
Philippe Mora is a French-born Australian film director. Born in 1949 to a German Jewish father and a French Jewish mother, he began making films while still a child.- Career :...
(a noted film director), William Mora and Tiriel Mora
Tiriel Mora
Tiriel Mora is an Australian television and film actor. He is the son of Melbourne artist Mirka Mora and Georges Mora , German-born Australian entrepreneur, art dealer, patron, connoisseur and restaurateur....
(a prominent Australian actor).
Whitaker was running a freelance penthouse photo studio in Flinders Street, Melbourne
Flinders Street, Melbourne
Flinders Street is a notable street in Melbourne, Victoria, Australia. Running roughly parallel to the Yarra River, Flinders Street forms the southern edge of the Hoddle Grid. It is exactly one mile in length and one and half chains in width...
when he had his fateful meeting with The Beatles
The Beatles
The Beatles were an English rock band, active throughout the 1960s and one of the most commercially successful and critically acclaimed acts in the history of popular music. Formed in Liverpool, by 1962 the group consisted of John Lennon , Paul McCartney , George Harrison and Ringo Starr...
and their manager Brian Epstein
Brian Epstein
Brian Samuel Epstein , was an English music entrepreneur, and is best known for being the manager of The Beatles up until his death. He also managed several other musical artists such as Gerry & the Pacemakers, Billy J. Kramer and the Dakotas, Cilla Black, The Remo Four & The Cyrkle...
, 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
Paul McCartney
Sir James Paul McCartney, MBE, Hon RAM, FRCM is an English musician, singer-songwriter and composer. Formerly of The Beatles and Wings , McCartney is listed in Guinness World Records as the "most successful musician and composer in popular music history", with 60 gold discs and sales of 100...
and George Harrison
George Harrison
George Harrison, MBE was an English musician, guitarist, singer-songwriter, actor and film producer who achieved international fame as lead guitarist of The Beatles. Often referred to as "the quiet Beatle", Harrison became over time an admirer of Indian mysticism, and introduced it to the other...
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
Peter Burns
Peter Burns was an Australian rules footballer in the Victorian Football Association and Victorian Football League .Burns was a tall ruckman and full-back...
. 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 PacemakersGerry & the Pacemakers
Gerry and the Pacemakers were a British beat music group prominent during the 1960s. In common with The Beatles, they came from Liverpool, were managed by Brian Epstein and recorded by George Martin. They are most remembered for being the first act to reach number one in the UK Singles Chart with...
(including cover shots for their How Do You Like It and Ferry Across The Mersey LPs) and Cilla Black
Cilla Black
Cilla Black OBE is an English singer, actress, entertainer and media personality, who has been consistently popular as a light entertainment figure since 1963. She is most famous for her singles Anyone Who Had A Heart, You're My World, and Alfie...
(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
The Seekers
The Seekers are an Australian folk-influenced pop music group which were originally formed in 1962. They were the first Australian popular music group to achieve major chart and sales success in the United Kingdom and the United States...
, 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
John Lennon
John Winston Lennon, MBE was an English musician and singer-songwriter who rose to worldwide fame as one of the founding members of The Beatles, one of the most commercially successful and critically acclaimed acts in the history of popular music...
, 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
Shea Stadium
William A. Shea Municipal Stadium, usually shortened to Shea Stadium or just Shea , was a stadium in the New York City borough of Queens, in Flushing Meadows–Corona Park. It was the home baseball park of Major League Baseball's New York Mets from 1964 to 2008...
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
Klaus Voormann
Klaus Voormann is a German Grammy Award-winning artist, noted musician, and record producer. He designed artwork for many bands including The Beatles, The Bee Gees, Wet Wet Wet and Turbonegro. His most notable work as a producer was his work with the band Trio, including their worldwide hit "Da Da...
collage-illustration on the cover of the group's landmark 1966 LP Revolver
Revolver (album)
Revolver is the seventh studio album by the English rock group The Beatles, released on 5 August 1966 on the Parlophone label and produced by George Martin. Many of the tracks on Revolver are marked by an electric guitar-rock sound, in contrast with their previous LP, the folk rock inspired Rubber...
, 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
George Harrison
George Harrison, MBE was an English musician, guitarist, singer-songwriter, actor and film producer who achieved international fame as lead guitarist of The Beatles. Often referred to as "the quiet Beatle", Harrison became over time an admirer of Indian mysticism, and introduced it to the other...
.
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
Nikon
, also known as just Nikon, is a multinational corporation headquartered in Tokyo, Japan, specializing in optics and imaging. Its products include cameras, binoculars, microscopes, measurement instruments, and the steppers used in the photolithography steps of semiconductor fabrication, of which...
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
A Collection of Beatles Oldies
A Collection of Beatles Oldies is a compilation album featuring a selection of songs by The Beatles recorded between 1963 and 1966...
.
The "butcher cover"
Whitaker's most celebrated work is the 1966 photo which was appropriated for The Beatles' infamous Yesterday and TodayYesterday and Today
Yesterday and Today is the ninth Capitol release by The Beatles and the eleventh overall American release. It was issued only in the United States and Canada...
album cover, which was briefly released in the U.S.
United States
The United States of America is a federal constitutional republic comprising fifty states and a federal district...
in 1966 but hastily withdrawn.
This now-legendary image was originally conceived as one of a triptych of photographs, and intended as a surreal, satirical pop art
Pop art
Pop art is an art movement that emerged in the mid 1950s in Britain and in the late 1950s in the United States. Pop art challenged tradition by asserting that an artist's use of the mass-produced visual commodities of popular culture is contiguous with the perspective of fine art...
observation on The Beatles’ fame. Whitaker’s inspirations for the images included the work of German surrealist Hans Bellmer
Hans Bellmer
Hans Bellmer was a German artist, best known for the life-sized pubescent female dolls he produced in the mid-1930s. Historians of art and photography also consider him a Surrealist photographer.-Biography:...
, 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
Minotaure
Minotaure, published between 1933 and 1939, was a Surrealist-oriented publication founded by Albert Skira in Paris. The editors were André Breton and Pierre Mabille. It was a luxurious publication, sporting original artworks on its cover by prestigious artists like Pablo Picasso...
in 1934. Whitaker has also cited Meret Oppenheim
Méret Oppenheim
-External links:**** http://www.artchive.com/artchive/M/man_ray.html...
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
Capitol Records
Capitol Records is a major United States based record label, formerly located in Los Angeles, but operating in New York City as part of Capitol Music Group. Its former headquarters building, the Capitol Tower, is a major landmark near the corner of Hollywood and Vine...
. In a Nov. 15 1991 interview with Goldmine
Goldmine (magazine)
Goldmine, established in 1974, is an American magazine that focuses on the collectors' market for records, tapes, CDs, and music-related memorabilia. Each issue features news articles, interviews, discographies, histories, current reviews on recording stars of the past and present. Discographies...
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
Icon
An icon is a religious work of art, most commonly a painting, from Eastern Christianity and in certain Eastern Catholic churches...
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
Christine Keeler
Christine Margaret Keeler is an English former model and showgirl. Her involvement with a British government minister discredited the Conservative government of Harold Macmillan in 1963, in what is known as the Profumo Affair....
taken by his contemporary Lewis Morley
Lewis Morley
Lewis Morley, born in Hong Kong, 1925, to English and Chinese parents, is a photographer. He was interned in Stanley Internment Camp during the Japanese occupation of Hong Kong between 1941 and 1945, when he was released and went to the United Kingdom with his family. He studied at Twickenham Art...
, 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
Paul McCartney
Sir James Paul McCartney, MBE, Hon RAM, FRCM is an English musician, singer-songwriter and composer. Formerly of The Beatles and Wings , McCartney is listed in Guinness World Records as the "most successful musician and composer in popular music history", with 60 gold discs and sales of 100...
. In his book Shout, Beatles biographer Philip Norman
Philip Norman (author)
Philip Norman is an English novelist, biographer, journalist and playwright.Norman grew up in Ryde, Isle of Wight. He attended Ryde School, and his father, Clive Norman, ran the Seagull Ballroom on Ryde Pier. He described his childhood in his book Babycham Night...
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 EMIEMI
The EMI Group, also known as EMI Music or simply EMI, is a multinational music company headquartered in London, United Kingdom. It is the fourth-largest business group and family of record labels in the recording industry and one of the "big four" record companies. EMI Group also has a major...
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, four 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
Cream (band)
Cream were a 1960s British rock supergroup consisting of bassist/vocalist Jack Bruce, guitarist/vocalist Eric Clapton, and drummer Ginger Baker...
's landmark 1967 LP Disraeli Gears
Disraeli Gears
Disraeli Gears is the second album by British supergroup Cream. It was released in November 1967 and went on to reach #5 on the UK Albums Chart. It was also their American breakthrough, becoming a massive seller there in 1968, reaching #4 on the American charts...
:
- "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
Oz (magazine)
Oz was first published as a satirical humour magazine between 1963 and 1969 in Sydney, Australia and, in its second and better known incarnation, became a "psychedelic hippy" magazine from 1967 to 1973 in London...
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 DalíSalvador Dalí
Salvador Domènec Felip Jacint Dalí i Domènech, Marquis de Púbol , commonly known as Salvador Dalí , was a prominent Spanish Catalan surrealist painter born in Figueres,Spain....
, whom he photographed several times between 1967 and 1972. He first met Dalí 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 Dalí, 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
Nicolas Roeg
Nicolas Jack Roeg, CBE, BSC is an English film director and cinematographer.-Life and career:Roeg was born in London, the son of Mabel Gertrude and Jack Nicolas Roeg...
’s Performance
Performance (film)
Performance is a 1968 British crime drama film; the film was produced in 1968 but not released until 1970. Directed by Donald Cammell and Nicolas Roeg, Performance stars James Fox and Mick Jagger of The Rolling Stones in his film acting debut.-Plot:...
and he accompanied Jagger to Australia to photograph him on location during the filming of Ned Kelly
Ned Kelly (1970 film)
Ned Kelly is a 1970 British adventure film. It was the second Australian feature film version of the story of 19th century Australian bushranger 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
National Gallery of Victoria
The National Gallery of Victoria is an art gallery and museum in Melbourne, Australia. Founded in 1861, it is the oldest and the largest public art gallery in Australia. Since December 2003, NGV has operated across two sites...
in 1998, before heading to America for a two-year tour there.
For many years, Whitaker fought an ongoing battle with Apple Corps
Apple Corps
Apple Corps Ltd. is a multi-armed multimedia corporation founded in January 1968 by the members of The Beatles to replace their earlier company and to form a conglomerate. Its name is a pun. Its chief division is Apple Records, which was launched in the same year...
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
Derek Taylor
Derek Taylor was an English journalist, writer and publicist, best known for his work as press officer for The Beatles...
, 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
London Palladium
The London Palladium is a 2,286 seat West End theatre located off Oxford Street in the City of Westminster. From the roster of stars who have played there and many televised performances, it is arguably the most famous theatre in London and the United Kingdom, especially for musical variety...
. 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
Neil Aspinall
Neil Stanley Aspinall was a British music industry executive. A school friend of Paul McCartney and George Harrison, he went on to head The Beatles' company Apple Corps....
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 Dalí 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 http://www.auspost.com.au/philatelic/stamps/index.asp?link_id=1.645 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.