In the early 1970s, Robert Ashton shared house with Carol Jerrems and Ian Macrae in Mozart Street, St Kilda,[1] their artist associates being Ingeborg Tyssen, Paul Cox and Bill Heimerman, and Ashton's cousin Rennie Ellis with whom he shared a studio[2] in Greville Street, Prahran.
[6] Photography curator Judy Annear notes that; "Robert Ashton's work is typical of the highly personalised documentary photographs that began to emerge in the 1970s.
[9][10] 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,[11] of "kids on the prowl, the old Salvo street bands, the Koorie clans, the card joint kaphenois",[12] were first shown at Brummels in an 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.
[15] 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.