Robert Whitaker (photographer) - Later Career

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 Dalí, 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 In 1991 he gathered some of his previously unpublished photographs of The Beatles for his successful book The Unseen Beatles.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 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.