Your backstage pass to 70s and 80s sounds and scenes

Gettin’ robbed, gettin’ stoned, gettin’ beat up, broken boned

Two of the music industry’s highest-selling performers originated in suburban Australia. The Bee Gees started out in Brisbane, for instance, and AC/DC – whose Back in Black (1980) has sold more than 50 million copies – played their first gigs at a nightclub in inner Sydney.

'As necessity or luxury, to integrate or rebel, in freedom or oppression, dress is the nexus of selfhood. Photography and dress are forever entwined; from its inception in the 1840s one of photography’s main objectives has been the making of portraits. Clothing has been imaged by photographers ever since. In documentary mode, photography provides a record of the ways we dress and how clothing has changed over time...'

Dressing up: clothing and camera exhibition draws together photographs from the MGA collection that feature dress or clothing as a significant element in their making. Some of the photographers included have produced works with documentary intent. For many, a classification of their practice is not so clear cut. These artists photograph dress, clothing and the body to actively question appearances. They use photography as a tactic for testing the nature of consumer culture, challenging social norms or protesting histories of colonisation and discrimination. Shaping and shaped by the individual, our clothes can conceal, reveal and transform who we are. Like the photographs in this exhibition they are the bearers of memory, emotion and time.
Curator: Gareth Syvret

Photographer Rennie Ellis (1940–2003) was a key figure in Australian visual culture. Ellis is best remembered for his effervescent observations of Australian life during the 1970s and 1980s.

The Rennie Ellis Show highlights some of the defining characters of Australian life during this period, including politicians, punk rockers, spiritual leaders and advocates of the sexual revolution.

The photographs in this exhibition explore the subcultures of the time, and take us back to a moment in our history when inner city housing was affordable, social protestors were optimistic and a sense of community could be achieved without the internet.

All the photographs in this exhibition have been drawn from the two Rennie Ellis award winning books Decade:1970-1980 and Decadent:1980-2000

Head On Photo Festival, Rennie Ellis Photographic Archive, and Mossgreen Gallery are pleased to showcase Kings Cross 1970-1971: Rennie Ellis, an exhibition of Rennie Ellis’ photographic observation of life in the infamous Kings Cross during the summer of 1970-71.

Kings Cross remains a place of intrigue… as Ellis wrote in the book, Kings Cross Sydney, by Rennie Ellis and Wesley Stacey - “It has a pulse rate and a lifestyle unlike anywhere else in Australia”.

When Rennie Ellis founded Brummels - the first photography gallery in Australia - in December 1972, he officially opened the gallery with the exhibition Two Views of Erotica that showcased works by Henry Talbot and the then relatively unknown photographer, Carol Jerrems.  Now, Jerrems is lauded as one of Australia’s most prominent photographic artist.

For Jerrems, photography had a crucial social role: 'the society is sick and I must help change it'.  She produced a body of photographs that symbolized the hopes and aspirations of the counter-culture in Australia in the 1970s. Sadly, Jerrems fell ill in 1979 with Budd-Chiari syndrome - a rare blood disease. She died on 21 February 1980 without having reached her 31^st birthday. Back then, Rennie Ellis sensed that she also died of "a broken heart”.

Ellis had a close relationship with Jerrems who permitted him to photograph her nude in her bedroom at Mozart Street, St. Kilda in 1970. These intimate photographs by Ellis are included alongside rare vintage and highly collectable works by Carol Jerrems at the Josef Lebovic Gallery.

The Rennie Ellis Show highlights some of the defining images of Australian life in the 1970s and '80s.

For the iconic Australian photographer Rennie Ellis, the period from the 1970s to the 1990s was a great period of change — a world free of risk, of affordable inner city housing, of social protest, of disco and pub rock, of youth and exuberance.

Ellis was a master of immersing himself in any scene, and photographing it in rich and frank detail, and is best remembered for his effervescent observations of Australia, including his now iconic book Life’s a beach.

This exhibition highlights some of his most defining images of Australian life from the period of Gough Whitlam and Malcolm Fraser, Paul Keating and Bob Hawke; AC/DC and punk rock; cheap petrol and coconut oil; Hare Krishnas and Hookers and Deviates Balls.

The Rennie Ellis Show is presented by the Rennie Ellis Photographic Archive along with Monash Gallery of Art, drawing on photographs from the Rennie Ellis Photographic Archive, and is supported by the Victorian Government through Creative Victoria.

The exhibition will be supported by two important books of Ellis’s work – Decade and Decadent.

The Rennie Ellis Show highlights some of the defining images of Australian life in the 1970s and '80s.

This was the period of Gough Whitlam, Paul Keating and Bob Hawke; AC/DC and punk rock; cheap petrol and  coconut oil; Hare Krishna's and street protests and Rennie Ellis was there to take photos of everyone in all their glory...

In 1973 the Australian Gay Liberation movement upped the ante by instigating a series of Gay Pride festivals in Adelaide, Brisbane, Melbourne and Sydney. This was a time when homosexual sex was classified as a criminal act across Australia, and the Gay Pride events sought to challenge these repressive laws and openly celebrate gay and lesbian culture in public spaces.

Rennie Ellis, the most prolific photojournalist of Australian society during the 1970s and 80s, documented Melbourne’s Gay Pride Week with his characteristic warmth and candour. Commissioned to photograph the event for the National Review, Ellis captured everything from transgressive cross-dressers and camped up political banners to same-sex couples enjoying romantic interludes on the lawns of the Botanic Gardens.

This is the only substantial visual record of Melbourne’s first gay and lesbian festival, and most of the photographs in this exhibition have never been exhibited before now.

"On the Beach" considers the place of the beach within Australian life. A public space of recreation and leisure the beach epitomises the liberties of Australia’s democratic society. While in the lead up to Federation many 19^th century artists looked to the bush to galvanise a fledging nationalism, by the mid-20^th century this had shifted and increasingly the beach became the site of Australian identity. The exhibition considers this history in light of the Cronulla race riots. 2015 marks the 10^th anniversary of the riots and provides an opportunity for reflection about these events and the significance of the beach as the place where tensions boiled over. 

Bringing together over 75 works, including paintings and photographs by some of Australia’s acclaimed Modernists, together with works by contemporary artists, the exhibition considers the ways in which people relate to the beach, its place in understandings of national identity and its history as a contested site.

Includes works by Arthur Boyd, Gordon Bennett, Daniel Boyd, George Caddy, Max Dupain, Rennie Ellis, Tracey Moffatt, David Moore, Sidney Nolan, Polixeni Papapetrou, John Perceval,

The Pass~Port and Rennie Ellis Archive collaboration celebrates the work of an iconic Australian photographer, and shares it with a diverse audience of skateboarders, creatives and admirers.

When Trent Evans, founder of Pass~Port, first came across Rennie’s work, he felt an immediate connection to the people, places and moments documented. The youthfulness, playfulness, and unique Australianness of each image echoed the spirit Trent has channeled in Pass~Port since the brand’s inception. The collaboration of skateboards and apparel is intended as a reminder to a younger generation to go out and be daring, explore and push the envelope; just like Rennie.

We live in a time not unlike before. A moment where change is on our nose and solidarity is more important than ever. The freedom echoing in Rennie’s work should reflect our current spirit. Attitudes still need to change. It is still a time to pioneer and continue to define our cultural identity, with soul, honesty and, of course, the whole of community. Nadia Hernandez 2015

The Rennie Ellis Show:

The photographer Rennie Ellis (1940–2003) was a key figure in Australian visual culture. Ellis is best remembered for his effervescent observations of Australian life during the 1970s–90s, including his now iconic book Life is a beach. Although invariably inflected with his own personality and wit, the thousands of social documentary photographs taken by Ellis during this period now form an important historical record.

The Rennie Ellis Show highlights some of the defining images of Australian life from the 1970S and ‘80S. This is the period of Gough Whitlam and Malcolm Fraser, Paul Keating and Bob Hawke; AC/DC and punk rock; cheap petrol and coconut oil; Hare Krishnas and Hookers and Deviant balls.

This exhibition of 100 photographs provides a personal account of what Ellis termed ‘a great period of change’. Photographs explore the cultures and subcultures of the period, and provide a strong sense of a place that now seems worlds away, a world free of risk, of affordable inner city housing, of social protest, of disco and pub rock, of youth and exuberance.

Kings Cross 1970 to 1971: Photographs by Rennie Ellis

The gritty underbelly of Sydney's iconic Kings Cross from the 1970s is exposed in striking detail in our exciting new free exhibition, Kings Cross 1970 to 1971: Photographs by Rennie Ellis. Featuring original B&W images from the Library's collection and taken by renowned Australian photographer Rennie Ellis, this revealing exhibition opens 16 November