Robert Ashton has been photographing and exhibiting his work since the early 1970s. His photographs are held in the Australian National Gallery, as well as the Victorian, New South Wales and Tasmanian Galleries, and various private collections in Australia, U S A, and Europe.
He works in black and white and very recently in colour, using the camera to record the cultural marks we make in our environment. He is the co author with Gregory Day of "Trace", a book of poems and photographs made on the west coast of Victoria, Australia where he currently lives and works
« 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 p...