Robert Ashton (photographer)

Robert Ashton (1950) is an Australian photographer and photojournalist.
Early life and education.
Robert Ashton was born on August 11, 1950 in Melbourne. He studied Photography at Prahran College 1969-71 and graduated with a Diploma of Visual Arts and Design.
Career.
In the early 1970s, Robert Ashton shared house with Carol Jerrems and Ian Macrae in Mozart Street, St Kilda, their artist associates being Ingeborg Tyssen, Paul Cox and Bill Heimerman, and Ashton's cousin Rennie Ellis with whom he shared a studio in Greville Street, Prahran. From 1974 to 1981, Ashton was assistant director at Ellis's Brummels Gallery in Toorak Road, South Yarra, where he also exhibited.
Photography curator Judy Annear notes that;
His subject matter includes urban indigenous, life and incidents in inner suburbia in Melbourne, particularly Fitzroy. Writer and musician Mark Gillespie, who had become involved in a new publishing venture, Outback Press, with Fred Milgrom Colin Talbot and Morry Schwartz, commissioned Ashton for the book "Into the Hollow Mountain." Its images, of "kids on the prowl, the old Salvo street bands, the Koorie clans, the card joint "kaphenois"", were first shown at Brummels in a exhibition of that title in 1974, and when re-exhibited forty years later at Colour Factory, "serve as a rare documentation of day-to-day Melbourne and glimpse into an era that, while not actually all that distant, is most definitely a thing of the past."
Ashton has published several other books, of portraits and close-up, abstracted landscape, and exhibited widely in Australia. His photograph "Bernard Diving" featured in the 1988 exhibition, and on the cover its catalogue, "The Thousand Mile Stare", a survey of Australian photography published by the Victorian Centre for Photography.
In pursuing the best quality output for his imagery, Ashton adopted, and currently uses, hand-built large format cameras and advanced printing techniques including photogravure and the Collodion process.
He lives on Victoria's Surf Coast, and imagery of the ocean and landscape is a consistent interest.