Profiles

Step through the door of the quiet suburban cottage Lewis Morley shares with Pat, his wife of 54 years, and you enter a long hallway lined with picture frames, boxes of prints and shelves stacked neatly with portfolios and books. The Morley sittingroom is a wonder. Interesting African artifacts share shelves with sculpture, prints and paintings. Some of the latter are Lewis's own work, but many more are items he's collected or been given. And there is shelf upon shelf of books on art and photography. The atmosphere is relaxed, genteel and bohemian.

 
Charing Cross Road, 1960s

The Lewis Morley Retrospective at the Art Gallery of NSW had just concluded. Lewis and Pat were kept very busy throughout the show with the usual sorts of obligations that flow from such events. Though they both must have had just about enough of interviewers and people asking for another little piece of their time and energy, they are relaxed, easy and gracious. Pat brings out a fresh plunger of coffee as Lewis settles into a comfy chair.

At 81, Lewis is certainly entitled to rest on the broad couch of his laurels. But the creative fires have not gone out. With the Retrospective winding up, he was beginning to work on his next major project. 'It's going to be a coffee table book,' he said, adding with typical self-deprecation, 'all my books have been instant coffee, you know. But this time I hope it's going to be real coffee in the guise of a book with limited boxed editions with a photograph inside.'

Gathering the images together should be quite a task. Lewis's photographic output has been stupendous. Although best known for his work in the superheated entertainment and fashion worlds of 1960s London, Lewis began shooting regularly in the late 1950s. The '60s saw an explosion in his work rate. And, after emigrating to Australia in 1971, he continued his prodigious output as he moved into colour editorial photography for flagship titles of the day such as POL and Australian Belle (for which he produced 33 of the latter's first 75 covers). His collection (a representative sample occupied several large rooms at the Art Gallery of NSW Retrospective) fills hundreds of archival storage boxes, folders and portfolios. It's easy to imagine that the selection process for the book will be a long and arduous one.

Alec Guiness in character for the movie Father Brown, 1954

Asked if he still takes photographs, Lewis says mildly, 'not really.' But he does carry a little digital camera most of the time. And he continues to add new portraits to the series he's been accumulating since the early 1960s of his close friend, Barry Humphries.  Lewis is one of photography's great natural portraitists, but he says that these days he's more likely to take pictures of objects that intrigue him. 'Back in the '60s and '70s if you photographed somebody, they didn't mind. And you could use the photograph. But now if you photograph somebody you might get a punch in the nose. You can be sued because you haven't got a release form.'

Lewis first picked up a camera (it was a box brownie) in his early teens. He started photographing seriously when he was in the RAF and he found the camera invaluable on his frequent visits to Paris during the 1950s. He loved drawing the 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.

'I'm not very good at drawing people. But I found that I had a strength to photograph them.' When asked if good portrait photographers are able to anticipate the exact moment to press the shutter release in the same way skilled dancers anticipate and flow with their partner's movements, he chuckles and says, 'No, that's getting a little too precious I think. I find that it's a case of having a natural knack. There are certain people who can cook, who have the ability to do cordon bleu... two eggs and they can make a souffle. And there are people who take courses for five years and still make a bad souffle.'

Mother and daughter at window, England, 1950s.

'I get on with people quite well,' Lewis adds. '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. I think a lot of photographers upset people - perhaps if they're photographing someone very important, their attitude might be, "look mate, I'm as good as you". It upsets the person being photographed. But if you treat the person normally, they relax and when you say, "look left... turn right..." they'll do it.'

While Lewis is prepared to modestly acknowledge his gifts as a portrait photographer, he has always shied away from accolades. '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.'

The 1960's saw an upending of the old way of doing fashion photography. There was more wealth around and working class people had money for fashionable clothes. 'Prior to that, fashion photographers were usually upper class, they were rather effete, slightly gay.'

'The Cockney boys come in,' he added. 'They were gutsy, and fashion photography came to be [done by] these young these young photographers who had worked as assistants in well known studios, but who broke away from the stereotyped style of fashion photography. They broke the rules. I too followed my own rules.'

Crucially, a new generation of art directors arrived at the same time. 'The old-fashioned art directors were trained as art directors, and knew how to do a layout, and all that. The young art directors were sort of bypassing that [process] and saying "I want this sort of picture" and real straight photographers would say, "well you can't have that picture". So they'd come to me because I didn't know. I said, "okay, well we'll try it. And we'll do it." So I became quite popular with the art directors and that's how I started making a living. But it was purely on, I think, improvisation.'

Menu board, Paris, early 1960s

'I'm a jazz photographer', says Lewis. 'I'm like an early jazz player who can't read music. I have no sort of actual technical knowledge but I improvise. And that's my photography: improvisation all the time.'

It's an apposite metaphor because like a good jazz player's intuitive feel for music-making, Lewis clearly has an intuitive feeling for image and composition. Where such gifts come from is at heart a mystery. Some influences are obvious. His early interest, for instance, in drawing and his subsequent pursuit of painting and allied arts as a young man clearly prepared him well. But other formative currents have only revealed themselves recently.

Only a few weeks before the interview, Lewis was given a DVD called Visions of Light: The Art of Cinematography. As he watched it, he suddenly realised how influential cinematography had been in his own development. 'I started to go to the cinema from about 4 or 5 years of age. You could get in for 50 cents in Hong Kong [where Lewis was born to a Chinese mother and English father]. By the time I was 15, I was conversant with the works of Griffth and other lesser Hollywood directors. Later Fritz Lang and Carl Dreyer had a great impact on my sensibilities.

'I was very impressed with the photography in movies like The Cabinet of Dr. Caligari and Nosferatu.' The memories of those early experiences are still vivid too. One film that sort of seeded itself into my brain is Carl Dreyer's The Passion of Joan of Arc. This is fantastic. You see a blank screen with just one little head... something that was never done before, and it was great.'

When it comes to other photographers' work, Lewis mentions Richard Avedon, Walker Evans, Lisette Model and Andre Kertez during our conversations. But it is Jacques-Henri Lartigue who has a special place in his heart. 'If only I'd known about Lartigue when I first started. For me he's the one true photographer. He shot from the heart. He didn't say "this is going to be sold", he just shot because he loved it. And it springs out that way. They're beautiful shots.'

Statue of Liberty, 1962

When Lewis is asked about his own approach to photography, he denies any special talents. He'll admit to being something of a contrarian who has a natural inclination not to conform. Asked if creativity to some extent might arise out of being able to turn the world around to see it differently, Lewis responds, 'For me it's sort of elimination and selection. The obvious thing comes to mind and you eliminate and eliminate and then select what you think could be different. You ask "how else do I do it?" That's creativity, I think. It's not being a genius.'


Where's Christine Keeler?

Lewis Morley's 1963 image of Christine Keeler nude and seated in a strategically reversed replica Arne Jacobsen ANT chair is an icon of the era. Taken at the height of the Profumo affair, it has become the image for which Lewis is most widely known. While the scandal has long since faded from public memory, there is something about the unapologetic directness of Keeler's expression and the frank eroticism of her pose that continues to make it a compelling photograph more than four decades later.

At one point in our conversations, Lewis referred to it as 'this wretched Keeler image', but it seemed to me that even as he said it, there remained a certain protective affection. The pose has been copied innumerable times since, and for the most part such tributes leave him cold. 'There's been a few which I think have been great. The Homer Simpson [poster] was fantastic.' But just reversing a chair and getting someone well known to strip off and sit Keeler-style simply makes Lewis think "so what?" '

After talking with Lewis and after seeing some of his unpublished work, it occurred to me that to publish the Keeler image and a selection of his well-known portraits might be the obvious approach, but it wouldn't necessarily be the most interesting one. After all, his famous images are thus because they've been published so often. Moreover, he has written an autobiography and been profiled on numerous occasions by far better writers than me.

Happily, when asked if we might run a selection of hitherto unpublished images in Photo Review, Lewis found the idea amusing and agreed at once.

Crowded almost to the ceiling in some places, Lewis's main archive room is a trove of photographic treasures. To capture the images for this article, Lewis set up a floodlight and a little easel so that digital pictures could be taken then and there.

For the next two hours or so we looked at pictures, searching for those that he'd always liked but which for one reason or another had not previously been published. Time and again, he would pause at an image and enquire with a word or a gesture if it ought to be added to the selection. This polite and respectful informality is typical of Lewis Morley and it is easy to see how it has worked so well for him in his portraiture.

Each time a picture made the cut, so to speak, Lewis would take it out of the portfolio, prop it on the little easel and then frame and focus the camera. He'd stand back to let me peep through the viewfinder, take the shot and check the histogram. Then the print would go back to its portfolio and the trawl through his breathtaking collection would continue. I'm not quite certain how many photographs we looked at, but it would have been close to 100 pictures. By the time we finished, there were a couple dozen candidates for the Photo Review team to make a final selection from, but for every one included there are dozens more that could have taken their place.

Lewis' website is www.lewismorley.com

For more images, see Photo Review Issue 31.

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