Bubbles, blood and blagging: Inside the renaissance of Rennie Ellis, late cult photographer
Late cult photographer Rennie Ellis was a ‘people perv’ who gatecrashed some of Australian sport’s most sacred places. Josh Ellis speaks to SHANNON GILL about his dad’s wildest feats, greatest shots and bittersweet fame.
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“He was a people-perv,” is how Josh Ellis describes his late father, the cult photographer Rennie Ellis.
“Though, he’d always refer to himself as a ‘social diarist’.”
It’s appropriate that the ‘Melbourne Out Loud: Life through the lens of Rennie Ellis’ exhibition is on at the Victorian State Library as spring has sprung.
For all the ‘social diarising’ that Ellis did of life in the pre-millenium decades, it’s his work during football finals and spring racing carnivals that has sparked a renaissance in recent years.
The image of Richmond tough-man Robbie ‘Bones’ McGhie at a packed MCG complete with sharpie haircut, tattoos, lace-up guernsey and cigarette dangling from the mouth has become, belatedly, iconic.
Lionised on social media, it symbolises an alternative take on a sometimes overly-earnest game. It also provides a time capsule both for fashion and when the football star was also the everyman.
It’s even inspired songs - fellow Melbourne left-field cultural commentators TISM have just released a new single that opens with a paean to the shot.
The reverence in which Ellis’ work is now held is bittersweet for Josh, himself a photographer who spent many years working alongside his dad before he died in 2003.
“I always knew there was something there,” Josh says. “There’s pride, it’s just a shame it all came to fruition post his death.”
Australia’s oldest hippie
Once described by Phillip Adams as ‘Australia’s oldest hippie’, Rennie Ellis was a sports fan despite being more at home in the bohemian counter-culture.
It made for a delicious fish-out-of-water scenario that spawned some of the most startling records of our sporting life. As a child, Hawthorn fan Josh tagged along to many of his father’s expeditions.
The up-close and personal encounter he had with Hawks great Robert Dipierdomenico after the 1986 grand final is a precious childhood memory, coinciding with the football work of his dad that he treasures most.
“We went into the dressing rooms, dad blagging his way through, and he took that shot of ‘Dipper’ with the cup full of champagne,” Josh says.
“I got a mixture of champagne and blood on my face as Dipper yelled out ‘Hawthorn’. You couldn’t be in any more electric environment.”
Dipierdomenico remembers the moment well.
“It’s quite a nice taste, champagne and blood,” he tells CODE Sports.
“It was very unusual, because he wasn’t a sports photographer and I didn’t realise the blood was there.
“He caught me at the right place at the right time, you can’t make up those types of photos.”
Dipierdomenico later got to know Ellis, after the photographer asked him to attend an exhibition featuring the iconic images. It influenced the Hawthorn champion to take up the pursuit himself.
“I love my photography and in a way he inspired it because of that photo in the rooms,” he says.
While Ellis’ shots of players have become famous, his images of football fans shouting their lungs out have become a social record that is seldom seen. Josh thinks that turning his eye to the crowd was his dad’s primary reason for being at the footy.
“He enjoyed sport, but it was more the event itself that he enjoyed photographing; the people there and their reactions to what was going on.”
Black and white footage of grand finals past has always been accessible, yet to see Ellis’ shots focused on the stands brings a lost culture into full technicolour life.
Finding the underbelly
The mainstream pursuits of football and racing were incongruous subjects in the Ellis oeuvre given the underground was his spiritual home.
“He did like to find the underbelly,” Josh says.
One person’s sleaze is another person’s playground, and today’s generations would scarcely believe some of the things that Ellis documented from people who could be their grandparents. The world of sex, drugs and rock’n’roll make up as much of the exhibition as sporting images.
“He was about documenting Australians at play, whether that be strapped to an A-frame and getting whipped at 2am at the Hellfire Club, to socialites having chicken and champagne at the nursery at Flemington,” Josh says.
That outsider spirit informed his football work, and indeed the access he got to football.
Josh says Rennie never really had any accreditation or permission to be inside the heart of September action. He would jump on his bike with his camera and ride to the MCG not really knowing where the day would take him.
“Back in the day security was pretty lax, so he’d walk into the ground as an MCC member and then head down to the gate for the oval.
“He’d have the Australian journalist press pass and his camera bag over his shoulder and shout ‘press’ and they’d wave him through on to the oval.”
That act of gatecrashing made the shots of ‘Bones’, ‘Dipper’ and all those crowd shots possible.
The steward’s wrath
It was similar on the first Tuesday in November, when Ellis would wander into prohibited places to shoot the Melbourne Cup. When he was caught taking photos from under the inside rail, the Victorian Racing Club had had enough.
“He got called up to the stewards office,” Josh says.
“They ripped his photography pass off like a general court marshalling a sergeant and ripping their patches off!”
Ellis was banned the following year but for a free-spirit, that was a speed bump, not a roadblock.
He applied for accreditation as a French photojournalist and came to Flemington wearing a false moustache, ponytail, cartier specs and European threads. He fooled everyone, except long-time steward Des Gleeson.
“They caught eyes and Des gave dad a sneaky sideways smile,” Josh recalls.
His secret was safe.
Yet in 2024, his brilliance is no longer a secret. With the exhibition running until the end of January, AFL finals seems like the perfect time to discover how Melbourne once experienced it.
“What the state library has done is fantastic. He’d be beside himself,” Josh Ellis says.
‘Melbourne Out Loud: Life through the lens of Rennie Ellis’ is on at the State Library Victoria until 28 January 2025.
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Originally published as Bubbles, blood and blagging: Inside the renaissance of Rennie Ellis, late cult photographer
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