Dave Ellinger

Dave Ellinger is a salesman, photographer and set designer.

Biography

Dave Ellinger was born in July 1948 in Bulawayo, Rhodesia, where he attended high school at Hamilton High School from 1961 to 1966. As a teenager, he saw live stage shows ranging from school productions to professional companies, classical music to flamenco, but did not participate. For two years he was a volunteer usher at the Bulawayo Theatre however, which he says did broaden his view of live stage shows.

He moved to Cape Town in 1968 and in 1969 began studying Pharmacy at the Cape Town Technical College. He settled in Muizenberg where he lived extremely close to the Masque Theatre on the Main Road, and got involved there as a volunteer, soon getting involved operating the lighting board or the sound tape deck, painting flats, or whatever was needed. He also had bit parts in a Xmas pantomime.

At that time he was also starting to enjoy an informal apprenticeship with two professional photographic studios, which led to him taking press publicity photographs and foyer photographs for the Masque Theatre. Word of mouth then led him to many other theatre groups, notably Sons of England in Claremont, where he again helped in any way possible, from set construction to stage management.

His photographic style was inspired partly by the work of the eminent theatre photographer and director Brian Astbury at the Space Theatre in Cape Town, and so it came about that he worked as a freelance photographer with many amateur dramatic societies in the Cape Town area between 1970 and 1975, supplying supplied hundreds of front-of-house enlargements for foyer display and for press publicity.

Om 1975 he became part of a spiritual community in the Paarl valley, and then undertook what he calls "a long detour" into Hotel Management at the Hohenort Hotel in Constantia and the Rob Roy Hotel, at Bothas Hill, before he joined Republican Press in 1984 as a staff photographer. He became the chief photographer in 1995, working on assignments for a variety of magazines until the editorial offices moved to Johannesburg in 2000.

From 2001 he worked for Whysalls Pty Ltd., the well-known photographic dealers, as a salesman until 2014.

Contribution to South African theatre, film, media and performance

In his period as freelance photographer in Cape Town, his clients included many amateur dramatic societies in the Cape Town area, for whom he produced hundreds of front-of-house enlargements for foyer display and for press publicity purposes, as well as creating sets for some shows.

The list of shows photographed in that period include: