Lewis Morley (1925–2013) left London to live in Sydney in 1971, having established his reputation with a series of photographs of British celebrities of the 1960s including Charlotte Rampling, Vanessa Redgrave, Jean Shrimpton, Peter Cook and Dudley Moore. Amongst his work is one of the world’s most famous photographic portraits – that of Christine Keeler, short-term shared mistress of a British politician and a Soviet diplomat, naked on a Scandinavian chair. By the beginning of the 1970s Morley’s magazine and theatre work in London was petering out, and he emigrated to Australia, where, to his delight, ‘bingo! there was the sixties all over again’. The National Portrait Gallery in London staged a retrospective show, Lewis Morley: Photographer of the Sixties in 1989. Fourteen years later, in conjunction with Morley, the Australian National Portrait Gallery mounted Myself and Eye, a retrospective of his international and Australian photographs. The Gallery has more than fifty of his photographs of Australian subjects, many taken for exciting new lifestyle publications of the 1970s such as Dolly, POL and Belle.
Collection: National Portrait Gallery
Gift of the artist 2003
© Sage
Lewis Morley (49 portraits)
On one level The Companion talks about the most famous and frontline Australians, but on another it tells us about ourselves.
Magda Keaney speaks with Lewis Morley about his photographic career and the major retrospective of his work on display at the NPG.
Over the last five years the National Portrait Gallery has developed a collection of portrait photographs that reflects both the strength and diversity of Australian achievement as well as the talents of our photographers.
