A major influence was undoubtedly his friendship with two of the leading figures of the Melbourne art world, Georges Mora and Mirka Mora, and through them he came into contact with numerous major figures in Australian art and letters including John Reed and Sunday Reed, Ian Sime, Charles and Barbara Blackman, Barrett Reid, Laurence Hope, Arthur Boyd, Sidney Nolan and Joy Hester, as well as his own peer group including Martin Sharp, Richard Neville, Barry Humphries and Germaine Greer.
Whitaker was running a freelance penthouse photo studio in Flinders Street, Melbourne when he had his fateful meeting with The Beatles and their manager Brian Epstein, during their 1964 Australian tour.
His meeting came about more or less by accident, when he was asked to accompany a journalist friend to an interview with Brian Epstein for an article for Melbourne community newspaper The Jewish News.
Whitaker's first published photograph featuring the group depicted Paul McCartney and George Harrison each holding up boomerangs presented to them by their Australian fans.
I initially turned it down, but after seeing The Beatles perform at Festival Hall I was overwhelmed by all the screaming fans and I decided to accept the offer to return to England ".Whitaker accepted the job three months later, but before he left he spent one final Sunday at the Aspendale beach house of his friends Georges and Mirka Mora, taking a set of historic pictures which were exhibited for the first time in the Monash Gallery of Art's 2003 exhibition of his work.
He spent the next two years travelling with the Beatles and shooting them at work, at rest and at play—on their tours, at home, in the recording studio, during private moments, and in formal photo sessions.
These include several photographs of the four at work on a collaborative painting Images of a Woman, the only such artwork they ever undertook, and a colour photo of the group inspecting antiques, which was used on the back cover of the compilation album A Collection of Beatles Oldies.
Among the resulting images was that which has since become known as the "Butcher" photo, depicting The Beatles wearing white coats and draped with dismembered doll parts, artificial eyes, slabs of meat and false teeth.
Whitaker's inspirations for the images included the work of German surrealist Hans Bellmer, notably his 1937 book Die Puppe (La Poupée).
I got George to knock some nails into John’s head, and took some sausages along to get some other pictures, dressed them up in white smocks as butchers, and this is the result -- the use of the camera as a means of creating situations.
"Whitaker was later quoted as saying that the basic motivation for making "A Somnambulant Adventure" came from the fact that he and The Beatles were "really fed up at taking what one had hoped would be designer-friendly publicity pictures"; in the interview conducted just before his death in 1980, John Lennon confirmed this.
The background was to be painted gold like a Russian icon and to have the Fab Four's heads surrounded by jewelled halos, with the photos bordered in rainbow colours.
This decoration, contrasted with the bizarre situations of the photos themselves, was evidently intended to create a surreal juxtaposition between the band's image and celebrity, and the underlying fact that they were just as real and human as everyone else.
It shows The Beatles dressed in butchers’ coats, draped with slabs of red meat, false teeth, glass eyes and dismembered doll parts.
This picture was actually titled "A Somnambulant Adventure" and Bob's intention was to add other elements to it which would create a jarring juxtaposition between idolisation of The Beatles’ as gods of the pop world and their flesh and blood reality as ordinary human beings, but he was never able to realise this.
In his book Shout, Beatles biographer Philip Norman claims that Brian Epstein had "misgivings" about the picture and felt it would disrupt the band's meticulously managed image, which had taken a hammering in the wake of the "bigger than Jesus" controversy.
None of these appearances seem to have caused any appreciable adverse reaction in the UK, even though they were published only days before Capitol's promotional release of the "Butcher Sleeve" version of Yesterday and Today.
The label was still reeling from the fallout from John Lennon's notorious "bigger than Jesus" quip in March 1966, which had sparked a wave of protests and record burnings in conservative areas of the United States.
For this reason, and to avoid any possible controversy or undeserved harm to the Beatles' image or reputation, Capitol has chosen to withdraw the LP and substitute a more generally acceptable design.
The offending Butcher photo was replaced by an unremarkable Whitaker shot of the Beatles gathered around a large steamer trunk, taken in Brian Epstein's office.
After the album was released, news of the ‘paste-over’ operation leaked out, and Beatle fans across America began steaming the cabin trunk photos off of their copies of Yesterday and Today in the hope of finding the "butcher" cover underneath.
George Harrison himself called it "the definitive Beatles collectible" and Bob Whitaker relates the story of a woman who came up to him with an unpeeled ‘paste-over’ cover in the US, had him autograph it, and promptly sold it for US$40,000.
It transpired that after the recall in 1966, Peter's father had taken home a full box of the albums (five stereo and about twenty mono copies) from the inventory that would otherwise have had the new cover pasted over it.
Over the next few months, under pressure from collectors, Peter Livingston slowly sold the remaining mono copies, by which time the price has risen to US$3000.
"Whitaker's next major project, and one of his most famous collaborations, was created with Sharp—the classic psychedelic album cover for the landmark 1967 LP Disraeli Gears by British supergroup Cream.
"The photos he took include three extreme close-ups of Dalí, plus one of Whitaker's wife Susie basking topless under the Spanish sun alongside the artist.
One of the most famous photographs from this period, the eerily beautiful "Bangladesh (1971)" depicts two dead soldiers near the Indian border, lying in golden sunlight, as if asleep.
Apple Corps told him they do not want the image reproduced as a book cover, postcard, poster, "virtually in no form whatsoever", a move which so angered Whitaker that he considered making an enormous print of the "Butcher Sleeve" for his "Underground London" exhibition and putting it behind closed doors so that people would have to file in one at a time.
When asked for his opinion on the situation, the late Derek Taylor, Apple Corps' long-serving press manager, was quoted as saying that "the person who might know who has the actual copyright to the ‘Butcher's Sleeve’ picture is not yet born."
The next day Aspinall phones to say that he thinks I should give the Anthology all the pictures for nothing, having spent six months deciding which images should be reprinted, retouched and repaired.