People talk about you being a great photographer and I sort of feel guilty. I really do. Because things happen to me. It has been like this all my life. I’m not trying to be modest, I’m an awful photographer. Seriously, I’m hopeless technically. But I improvise and that’s why I became used a lot by young art directors in the 60s.

During the 70s and into the 80s Morley worked extensively for POL (edited by Oz founder Richard Walsh), Woman’s Day and the Australian design magazine Belle, winning acclaim fame for his immaculate colour photographs of home interiors. He continued his work in portraiture with studies of Australian celebrities such as John Newcombe, Juni Morosi, Marcia Hines, Brett Whiteley, Helen Glad [ the granddaughter of Norman Lindsay] and the young Nicole Kidman.

I found photography so easy. I mean, when I say easy, here I was having a full life by just having to point a camera and flicking a shutter. Now, that, I think is great. I mean, whether my photographs are good or bad or indifferent, I don’t know, but I’ve managed to make a living from it and I’m quite happy on that score. I've had a very enjoyable, adventurous, exciting life and I have no regrets about being a photographer.

Lewis Morley was born in Hong Kong in 1925 to a Chinese mother and English father. He had a relatively privileged upbringing, raised as part of Hong Kong’s European colonial elite, but his teenage years were dramatically interrupted by the Japanese invasion in 1941 and the Morleys spent the rest of the war in a Japanese internment camp.

People say life in the camps was terrible. But I was lucky. I worked in the kitchen at Stanley Internament Camp and got extra food. I also had a girlfriend in the camp. And you could trade anything for a couple of cigarettes.

Morley took up photography in his teens as a hobby, using a bakelite Brownie camera, but during his captivity his real interest was in drawing and painting in watercolours.

I used to swap cigarettes for paints and paper. My drawings weren’t very good but it was a start. I still have some of those pictures.

When his family was repatriated to England after the war, Morley joined the RAF. In 1949, after leaving the air force, he studied commercial design at Twickenham Art School between 1949 and 1952.

Morley started photographing seriously when he was in the R.A.F and he found the camera invaluable on his frequent visits to Paris during the 1950s. He loved drawing architecture but it took him too long to sketch buildings. He found it simpler to photograph them first and then to use the resulting pictures as an inspiration and aid to memory for subsequent artistic efforts. However, it wasn’t long before he discovered that photography also opened up other avenues for expression.

Becoming seriously interested in photography in the 1950s, Lewis Morley finally dedicated himself to the medium following the first publication of his images, a six-page profile in Photography magazine in 1957. Morley began his full-time freelance photography career in his early thirties in London, regularly undertaking reportage and portraiture work for magazines such as Tatler, Go! and She. He was also heavily involved in theatre work, in London’s West End. Photographing the actors in situ, un-posed and with available light, Morley created images possessed with a fresh dynamism befitting gritty English realist-drama.

I’m not very good at drawing people but I found that I had a strength to photograph them … I get on with people quite well … I’m not a threat. I think certain photographers become threatening. They say ‘I’m a photographer, and you do what I tell you to do.’ I always maintain that if you behave like a maestro, then all your subjects become prima donnas. Treat people the way you like to be treated yourself.

… There are a lot of photographers in the world and these days, with versatile cell phones, everyone is a photographer, but Lewis was a real one. 

First of all, he was an artist and a lover of art with a great knowledge and an impressive private collection. He had an intense curiosity so that his pictures reveal their subjects intimately and with real compassion. 

They are not just snaps but shared insights and portraits of an epoch unmatched, in my view, by any of his contemporaries …