Mardi 09 Septembre 2014 14:44:57 par actuphoto dans Expositions

« In 1973 the writer and musician Mark Gillespie had become involved in a new publishing venture, Outback Press, with Fred Milgrom Colin Talbot and Morry Schwartz. Gillespie had become fascinated with the texture and intensity of the changing suburb of Fitzroy. The kids on the prowl, the old Salvo street bands, the Koorie clans, the card joint kaphenois, the shadows and glare of treeless bitumenous light. He had the idea for a book documenting the cusp, the cultural superimpositions that were taking place before his eyes.

He decided 23 year old arts graduate and photographer Robert Ashton would make a perfectly non-interventionist visual witness.
Ashton spent a year wandering the streets and pointing his lens. He documented the spartan shopfronts, the truculent faces, the skinhead tattoos. His camera lingered poignantly on the Sisters of Mercy Mission as well as on the temporary gloom of junkie bedsits.

These are the layers that give a city its gravitas, its tragic aspect and proper psycho-geography. In 1974 so much of the cultural strata of Fitzroy was still living and visible on the surface. Some forty years later this is clear in Ashton’s images.

The book, ‘into the hollow mountains’, came out in 1974, with a shirts-off strongman posing in front of frosted glass in the Builders Arms gracing the cover. It is now a rare and remarkable document. »

Gregory Day 2014

© Robert Ashton


© Robert Ashton