Decadent by Rennie Ellis (ISBN 9781742705347)

Decadent 1980–2000

80 81 82 83 84 85 86 87 88 89 90 91 92 93 94 95 97 98 99 00

Decadent 1980–2000

CONTENTS

9

FOREWORD— MANUELA FURCI

10

RENNIE ELLIS— WILLIAM YANG

12

DECADENT— ROBERT McFARLANE

17

PLATES

244

INDEX

251

ACKNOWLEDGEMENTS

Rennie Ellis 2001

Š Robert Ashton

8

DECA DENT IS A U N IQU E visual document examining the hedonistic society that emerged in Australia in the early eighties, an era that would see Rennie Ellis define himself ‘as an image junkie and compulsive photographer who delights in chronicling both popular culture and the demi-monde’, a man ‘intrigued by the quirkiness of human behaviour, especially when it ventures into the realms of the erotic, exotic and esoteric’.

When photographing, Rennie entered what he would later describe as ‘a state of grace with chance’, using his camera as a key to unlock the doors and cross the thresholds that brought him face to face with the excesses of hedonism. Intuitively, Rennie was committed to capturing moments in time that offered insights into the human condition. To achieve this intimacy, he became very much involved in the situations he was photographing, rather than standing back as a dispassionate observer.

His non-judgmental, charismatic presence gave him an ‘access-all-areas pass’ to people and situations that might normally be outside his experience, allowing him to indulge in his own voyeurism. Rennie felt a compulsion to ‘reveal the private and closed sides of life to a broader audience so they can be astounded and astonished’. By ‘holding a mirror image to society’, he sought to ‘show people how the other half lives’.

Selecting the images for Decadent was extremely challenging. Unlike Decadent’s companion book, Decade, there was no dummy manuscript, no blueprint of how Rennie envisaged the book, left behind after his death to guide us with our selection. How could we ensure the images we chose would be those that Rennie would have selected, had he still been alive?

There were clues among surviving exhibition prints and his Life’s a ... series of books—Life’s a Beach, Life’s a Ball, Life’s a Beer and Life’s a Parade—published in the eighties and nineties. Rennie writes of these books:

There is an element of eroticism (the tits and bums syndrome) in all of my books which is also indicative of my interests and priorities ... My photography legitimises my voyeuristic tendencies.

FOREWORD— MANUELA FURCI

Rennie Ellis’s ongoing passion for exploring the erotic implications of the female nude led to one of his final projects: documenting the famous Melbourne strip club Maxine’s.

Over a period of three years, Ellis was given complete access to the women who performed onstage and, at times for their own pleasure, backstage. ‘Maxine’s girls’, as they were known, strutted their stuff and teased the audience with provocative displays in shows entitled Sisters of Sleaze, Empress of Erotica and Lesbian Nights. In many of Rennie’s images the all-male audience’s reaction reveals more to the viewer than the naked women.

Since establishing the Rennie Ellis Photographic Archive in 2004 , we have realised many of Rennie’s dreams, holding exhibitions at major Australian public galleries and publishing Decade, a book he considered one of the most important projects he had ever undertaken (despite this, its manuscript languished as a mere prototype

from 1979 until his death in 2003). We also honoured his wish, stated in his will, to entrust a large portion of his oeuvre to the State Library of Victoria, which now holds the most complete collection of Rennie Ellis photographs in the world. And now, with the publication of Decadent, spanning two decades of Rennie Ellis’s work, we have created a book that reveals not only our nation at play, but also the fun-loving, non-judgmental spirit of Rennie, whose childlike curiosity led him to enter and expose these once-hidden realms of decadence.

I hope that we have done Rennie Ellis justice with our selection and that the photographs in this book not only ‘astound and astonish’ as he had intended, but also confirm Rennie’s reputation as one of Australia’s most daring, prolific and insightful social chroniclers —one whose photographs will continue to taunt, titillate and tickle our collective fantasies for years to come.

M A N U EL A F U RCI

Director, Rennie Ellis Photographic Archive

9

RENNIE ELLIS— WILLIAM YANG

I BECA M E AWA R E OF Rennie Ellis in 1978, through a photograph of his that I saw at an exhibition, The Way of Flesh, at the Australian Centre for Photography. The image showed a woman bending over into a car, her butt in your face, her figure somehow full of movement in that static moment. It made an impression, or perhaps it would be more accurate to say it resonated with my own aesthetic: a moment observed and captured without too much interference from the photographer; good framing, but not fussy; and a spontaneous enthusiasm, a genuine liking of the subject and the process of recording.

I later met Rennie in Sydney. He was a smiling, warm-hearted, friendly person, and this stood out in the competitive world of photography, where photographers rub shoulders in combat mode, jostling for position.

Rennie extended the hand of friendship.

We were both documentary photographers; we were both photographing an Australian social life that had previously been uncharted, partly because it hadn’t existed before. To us, the world seemed full of startling, fleshy and vivid images. He told me of his project photographing drug addicts in Kings Cross.

10

Photography emerged as an art form in Australia in the mid-seventies. There had been art photographers before this—Harold Cazneaux, Axel Poignant and Max Dupain to name a few, and David Moore was already well known—but now photography had its place as a genre in the art world, sealed with the opening of the Australian Centre for Photography in Paddington, Sydney. Photography was new and fashionable for about a decade in Australia, and it was an exciting time.

I knew most of the photographers who showed in galleries, or at least knew their work—the point being, it was a small group.

Most of the photographers worked in the photojournalistic style, and I guess there was much of Australian life and landscape that had not been documented. Most gallery photographers had either a job with a newspaper, or a practice where they did freelance work—myself and Rennie included, although he was much more enterprising than me: in 1972 he had already opened what is considered Australia’s first purely photographic gallery, Brummels.

Rennie Ellis was a good perv—‘I say this in the nicest possible way’, to quote Dame Edna —a point I strongly recognised in myself.

Perving could be more politely described as curiosity, fascination or obsession, and it comes down to looking closely at the world. As Diane Arbus said, the camera is a licence to stare.

A photographer is drawn to his subject, for whatever reason, and he pursues it. There is a kind of predatory aspect to photography— again, there are probably more polite ways of saying this—but it is basically hunting down or stalking your subject, focussing all of your attention on the action of pressing the shutter.

That being said, you can sneak a photo of a bare-breasted bather on the beach—maybe two or three—but to photograph the acres of female breasts seen in Rennie’s books Life’s a Beach, Life’s a Beach II and Life’s Still a Beach, you need persuasion, you need charm.

And Rennie had charm in spades: he always did his killing lightly and in good humour.

In the genre of social photography in Australia, there was already the serious ‘soup kitchen’ stuff and there was the documentation of high society, of a select group of socialites, Ladies and Sirs, who attended gala events covered by Women’s Weekly. But the times had changed: there had been the swinging sixties in London, Women’s Liberation, Gay Liberation and the rise of sex, drugs and rock ‘n’ roll, and the definition of ‘social’ had extended to cover all forms of social life and popular culture.

‘Party’ began to be used as a verb in the seventies; it meant to let down one’s hair, to dance, to get high, to shed clothing amid an atmosphere that promised sex. The people in Rennie’s photos all seem unintimidated by the camera, and it is thanks to his great skill that they are not openly posing for him; there is still a sense that the moment is just unfolding before the viewer’s eyes. Here are strident partygoers having a great time at all costs, and it strikes me as very Australian that they are throwing themselves into the action with such physical abandon. There are a great number of scenarios in the images of Decadent: this surely was an amazing era.

‘It was the best of times, it was the worst of times’—so wrote Charles Dickens in A Tale of Two Cities. In our tale, the two cities were Melbourne, Rennie’s turf, and Sydney, my turf.

The best of times was a feeling of liberation and freedom; a collective social euphoria where people threw off the shackles of polite society, brown-nosed the camera, acted lewdly in public, took copious amounts of recreational drugs; where women freely exposed their breasts, men wore suspenders and fishnet stockings à la Frank N. Furter of Rocky Horror Picture Show fame, and it was all thrilling. People felt they could be themselves, be uninhibited. And I guess this spilled into the worst of times: wretched excess, addiction.

But most survived with no regrets.

I met Rennie one year in Flinders Lane after the Sydney Mardi Gras. For the uninitiated, the Lane is situated between the Hordern Pavilion and Oxford Street proper, and it had become a tradition for gay, lesbian, bisexual and transgender people and their straight friends to hang there after the Mardi Gras parade and party, walking from the Hordern to congregate on Sunday morning.

They looked a little tatty: the makeup had smudged, and the feathers had moulted after the long night of celebration. Occasionally a drug deal occurred; the mood was louche, post-coital. At the time photography of the Mardi Gras parade and party was restricted to accredited press photographers, but the Lane was not restricted. Photographers would flock there like bees to nectar. Rennie and I met and exchanged photos, which is like shaking hands for photographers. Somehow in that moment it was acknowledged, perhaps just with a grin, that we were in our milieu: this decadent atmosphere, this hothouse that inspired our work. It was where we existed, and although we may not have done everything that our subjects did, we were symbiotically connected to them. We were fellow travellers.

It was incredible just to be there.

Years later, Rennie and I had coffee at a place near his studio in Prahran, Melbourne— just catching up. I asked him how he was, and he said he was slowing down. He used to bring out books of graffiti. ‘I got tired of climbing into locked toilets to shoot the walls,’ he said.

I remembered that. Yes, the seventies and eighties, that time of decadence, had passed too. That window of social history where ‘anything goes’—all those parties of excess, the fun, the defiance and the sex, both flaunted and actual—had closed. Yet the era still lives in photos.

W ILLI A M YA NG

Photographer and writer

William Yang and Rennie Ellis, Mardi Gras Recovery (Detail) 1999

© Stephen Dupont

11

DECADENT— ROBERT McFARLANE

how new photography is, historically—how, in just over a century and a half, adventurous photographers such as Matthew Brady and Roger Fenton, and more recently Don McCullin, demolished the myth of ‘the romance of war’, for example, replacing it with their own bleak poetry in monochrome.

Before photography’s invention, complex stories were told in words and preserved on paper—and earlier, in stone, either through sculpture, or through characters carved in relief and painted on city walls. Australian poet Richard Kelly Tipping, for whom words form a lifelong passion, once discovered, with characteristic exhilaration, ancient graffiti that told a vivid, touching story of passion spent several millennia ago. Roughly carved into a wall in Egypt, hieroglyphics told of a man remembering the ‘scent of his lover’s body ... still on his thigh, hours after making love’.

Slightly more recently, Pompeii’s destruction by the voluptuous breath of Mount Vesuvius was meticulously documented by eighteenyear-old Pliny the Younger in letters to Tacitus two millennia ago: ‘Like an umbrella pine ... [the ash cloud] rose to a great height and then split off into branches, I imagine because it was thrust upwards by the first blast.’

IT IS EASY TO FORGET

12

However, to discover the true excesses of life in that doomed Roman city, it is not Pliny the Younger’s words we turn to but pictures: anonymous, vivid fragments of frescoes discovered long after Pompeii’s abrupt extinction in 79 AD. These tell of an imprudent city in which sexual excesses, particularly in brothels, were hypocritically tolerated by citizens of the ancient Roman city. (Visiting a prostitute in Pompeii did not constitute adultery under Roman law.) There is no nineteenthcentury coyness in these frescoes, only enthusiastic, skilled renditions of a rampant sensuality that looks and feels remarkably familiar two millennia after being painted.

Between 1980 and the end of the twentieth century, Australian photographer Rennie Ellis (1940 –2003) documented what were, in retrospect, seismic social changes in Australia. The Melbourne-based photographer would take his camera everywhere: from established, conservative arenas of social pleasure like the Melbourne Cup to untidy, beer-strewn cauldrons of working class pleasure found in city hotels and nightclubs—and city streets. ‘Photography is a way of freeing myself,’ Ellis once declared, ‘it allows me to leave my own time and space and ... occupy, if only for a short time, another, often alien, environment.’

Immersing myself in the utter candour contained within Ellis’s Decadent images, I found myself thinking instinctively of Pompeii’s erotic frescoes. Though two thousand years separate these images from his similarly explicit, unsentimental images of public and private life, Ellis’s combination of wonder, affection and a love of physical beauty drew instant comparisons with ancient Pompeii’s ultimately fragile way of life. ‘I came face to face with the see-and-be-seen syndrome, the excesses of hedonism, the indulgences of wealth,’ recalled Ellis, adding, ‘I witnessed parties that provided an escape from the humdrum and the chance to live out fantasies.’

Rennie Ellis’s photographs of this short, intense era of changing public and private life have created a priceless tapestry of Australia’s recent, evolved social history. There is a clear sense in pictures such as Backstage, Style Aid, Melbourne 1988 that Ellis had discovered and identified a hidden tribe within Australian society: daring, vivid in their body-painted identities, previously shielded from prying eyes. Perhaps only William Yang, with an equally unblinking approach to observing a once-invisible, now confident homosexual culture, can be compared to Ellis as an unabashed chronicler of society.

Though suspending judgement on his enthusiastic, playful subjects, Ellis was not above expressing irony in his rendering of a newly liberated society. In Lady in Red, Melbourne Cup 1982, Ellis photographs a handsome young woman wearing a long red dress, slashed to the waist, holding a glass of champagne and a cigarette in one hand as she dances in public at the Melbourne Cup. No one in the crowd surrounding her at the iconic Australian horse race seems particularly disturbed by this performance and the young woman clearly dances for her own pleasure, in a state approaching elegant abandon. But then we notice the raised wooden surface on which she dances is actually the end of a small coffin.

Ellis doesn’t explain the coffin’s bleak presence but appears to suggest what we all know at heart: we are all dancing on the edge of possible catastrophe—so why not continue to dance?

Rennie Ellis and Models (Detail) 1980s

Š Josh Ellis

16

PHOTOGRAPHY LEGITIMISES MY VOYEURISTIC TENDENCIES

Dining Out, Inflation, Melbourne 1980

22

23

Hippopotamus Club, Rio 1985 Opposite—

Holding Hands, Hookers and Deviates Ball 1983

24

25

30

The Kiss, Gold Coast 1981

31

Get Down, Inflation, Melbourne c.1980

32

33