Robert Whitaker, English photographer, spent three years in Melbourne in the early 1960s, becoming friends with Mirka and Georges Mora, Barry Humphries, Germaine Greer, the Heide crowd and Martin Sharp and Richard Neville. In 1964, when he was running a freelance penthouse photo studio in Flinders Street, he accompanied a friend who was interviewing the touring Beatles for the Jewish News. After their manager Brian Epstein saw his photographs he offered Whitaker the position of staff photographer at his North End Music Stores. Whitaker returned to England to begin work there later that year. Amongst his first sitters were new arrivals The Seekers, several of whose albums were later to feature his photographs. He is best known, however, for his many photographs of The Beatles, including those used on the covers of The Beatles' Million Sellers, The Nowhere Man, Yesterday and Revolver. Infamously, a surrealist-inspired photograph he took in 1966 for Yesterday and Today, known to longing collectors as the 'Butcher Sleeve' was replaced by another, tamer image; a mint-condition record in the original sleeve is arguably the definitive Beatles collectible. By the late 1960s Whitaker was working in the Kings Road artists' colony The Pheasantry, also the base of Martin Sharp and Germaine Greer. In 1967, while contributing to early issues of Oz magazine, Whitaker and Sharp worked together on the cover of Cream's LP Disraeli Gears. Whitaker returned to Australia to photograph Mick Jagger on location during the filming of Ned Kelly; the photographs he took were exhibited at Melbourne's Gallery 101 in 1997. In 1991 his book The Unseen Beatles appeared; a touring exhibition, Underground London, came to Victoria in 1998. The exhibition Yesterday and Today: The photographs of Robert Whitaker 1962-2002 was exhibited at the Monash Gallery in 2002-2003. The National Portrait Gallery, London, owns Whitaker's photographs of members of The Beatles and Cream, and other figures from the 1960s.
