Self Portrait – Sydney – 1992
Silver gelatin photographic print
PXD 653 / 22
The very modest Lewis Morley (b. 1925) was one of the most significant photographers working in London in the swinging sixties — capturing icons of the entertainment, artistic and fashion worlds such as Jean Shrimpton, Salvador Dali, Twiggy, Michael Caine, Barry Humphries, Charlotte Rampling, Joe Orton, Susannah York, Peter Cook and Dudley Moore. Today he is best remembered for his portrait of a nude Christine Keeler straddling a copy of an Arne Jacobsen ‘Ant’ chair. Lewis Morley died without fanfare on Tuesday 3 September 2013.
In the 1989
film about the Profumo Affair called Scandal,
Joanne Whalley-Kilmer played Christine Keeler, Ian McKellen played John Profumo
and Bridget Fonda played Mandy Rice-Davies (a friend of Keeler’s who was also
caught up in the scandal).
Much of
Morley’s work in the Sixties was devoted to theatre photography and studio
portraits.
The chair used
in the Christine Keeler photograph is now in the collection of the Victoria
& Albert Museum in London. It was not an original Jacobsen chair as
indicated by the hand-hold cut out of the back of the chair as a ploy to avoid
the legalities of copyright.
Morley became
friends with British comedian Peter Cook who offered him studio space above his
nightclub The Establishment. Through Cook he was introduced to London’s
entertainment world, including Australian satirist Barry Humphries who also
became a friend.
The State
Library of NSW presented a retrospective of Lewis Morley’s photographs in 1993
in the exhibition Right Time, Right Place.
Morley became world famous in 1963 with what is
considered by many to be one of the photographic icons of the period, his
classic portrait of model Christine Keeler — then at the height of her fifteen
minutes of fame as one of the protagonists of the infamous Profumo Affair.
One of Morley’s
best known photographs from the 1970s is a nude group shot of the Australian
rock band Sherbert.
Morley chronicled the new idols of Sixties society in a
style that captured the buoyant spirit of the times.
The Profumo
Affair was a political sex scandal that rocked the British political
establishment in 1963. The British Secretaty for War, John Profumo, was found
to have lied when he stood up in the Commons and denied he had conducted an
affair with Christine Keeler who in turn was alleged to be the mistress of
Soviet spy Yevgeny ‘Eugene’ Ivanov when the Cold War was at its peak. The
scandal eventually brought down the government following the resignation of
British Prime Minister Harold Macmillan.
Morley took up
photography in his teens as a hobby, using a box brownie camera.
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