When Rennie Ellis founded Brummels - the first photography gallery in Australia - in December 1972, he officially opened the gallery with the exhibition Two Views of Erotica that showcased works by Henry Talbot and the then relatively unknown photographer, Carol Jerrems.  Now, Jerrems is lauded as one of Australia’s most prominent photographic artist.

For Jerrems, photography had a crucial social role: 'the society is sick and I must help change it'.  She produced a body of photographs that symbolized the hopes and aspirations of the counter-culture in Australia in the 1970s. Sadly, Jerrems fell ill in 1979 with Budd-Chiari syndrome - a rare blood disease. She died on 21 February 1980 without having reached her 31^st birthday. Back then, Rennie Ellis sensed that she also died of "a broken heart”.

Ellis had a close relationship with Jerrems who permitted him to photograph her nude in her bedroom at Mozart Street, St. Kilda in 1970. These intimate photographs by Ellis are included alongside rare vintage and highly collectable works by Carol Jerrems at the Josef Lebovic Gallery.

The Rennie Ellis Show highlights some of the defining images of Australian life in the 1970s and '80s.

For the iconic Australian photographer Rennie Ellis, the period from the 1970s to the 1990s was a great period of change — a world free of risk, of affordable inner city housing, of social protest, of disco and pub rock, of youth and exuberance.

Ellis was a master of immersing himself in any scene, and photographing it in rich and frank detail, and is best remembered for his effervescent observations of Australia, including his now iconic book Life’s a beach.

This exhibition highlights some of his most defining images of Australian life from the period of Gough Whitlam and Malcolm Fraser, Paul Keating and Bob Hawke; AC/DC and punk rock; cheap petrol and coconut oil; Hare Krishnas and Hookers and Deviates Balls.

The Rennie Ellis Show is presented by the Rennie Ellis Photographic Archive along with Monash Gallery of Art, drawing on photographs from the Rennie Ellis Photographic Archive, and is supported by the Victorian Government through Creative Victoria.

The exhibition will be supported by two important books of Ellis’s work – Decade and Decadent.

The Rennie Ellis Show highlights some of the defining images of Australian life in the 1970s and '80s.

This was the period of Gough Whitlam, Paul Keating and Bob Hawke; AC/DC and punk rock; cheap petrol and  coconut oil; Hare Krishna's and street protests and Rennie Ellis was there to take photos of everyone in all their glory...

In 1973 the Australian Gay Liberation movement upped the ante by instigating a series of Gay Pride festivals in Adelaide, Brisbane, Melbourne and Sydney. This was a time when homosexual sex was classified as a criminal act across Australia, and the Gay Pride events sought to challenge these repressive laws and openly celebrate gay and lesbian culture in public spaces.

Rennie Ellis, the most prolific photojournalist of Australian society during the 1970s and 80s, documented Melbourne’s Gay Pride Week with his characteristic warmth and candour. Commissioned to photograph the event for the National Review, Ellis captured everything from transgressive cross-dressers and camped up political banners to same-sex couples enjoying romantic interludes on the lawns of the Botanic Gardens.

This is the only substantial visual record of Melbourne’s first gay and lesbian festival, and most of the photographs in this exhibition have never been exhibited before now.