Monday, Aug. 28, 2006
Lewis Morley calls it "one of those boomerang photographs," as it's a picture that keeps bouncing back. And certainly Morley's silver—gelatin image of Swinging London call girl Christine Keeler—her notorious nudity concealed by shadow and a strategically placed chair—is a photographic icon that has cut through the vicissitudes of fashion. But the rest of Morley's 50—year career hasn't been so unapologetic, and it seems every few years the Hong Kong—born, English—trained and (for the past 35 years) Australian—based photographer is discovered anew. There have been retrospectives in London and Canberra, and an ongoing mission to measure the rest of Morley's oeuvre against this minx in the Modernist chair with the Mona Lisa smile.v
Art Gallery of New South Wales curator Judy Annear was one of the curious ones. While visiting Morley's last show at Australia's National Portrait Gallery in 2003, she was struck by the idea that "there must be more to Lewis than portraiture and the '60s." Until then the decade had defined him. In 1961, he had lucked upon a photographic studio above Peter Cook's bohemian club The Establishment, which supplied him with a never—ending stream of talent wanting to be made famous, from Jean Shrimpton to Michael Caine. Less known were Morley's early photojournalism or later, more personal reportage.
Befriended by Morley and entrusted with his home archive, Annear began searching for a connecting thread. Having turned 20th century photography upside down in her 2000 show "World Without End," this assiduous sleuth found her subject. Whether photographing the then—unknown Twiggy on a London street, or a ghostly skeleton in a Tasmanian museum 30 years later, Morley's instinct has been the same. Now in its final weeks at the AGNSW, Annear's survey show turns a celebrity shooter into a more curious gatherer of found objects.
Exhibit A has always been Keeler. Brought by Cook to publicize a film project, she arrived at Morley's studio less hardened and more naïve than the photographer was expecting, and the impression rings true of the man himself. In the decades since, Morley has rarely searched for a subject, finding fascination in what is close at hand. His insular gaze could be a legacy of the war years, when he and his family were interned by the Japanese.
Around that time Morley was given his first Kodak Brownie, and later, as a struggling painter in England, he found the camera useful for recording what he couldn't draw. From 1960, when he was asked to document the first of more than 100 West End plays, it provided his livelihood. Despite the stylistic constraints, his lens would draw something alluring from the shadows. What came into focus was not so much celebrity as the public's fascination for it. In 1963, Morley was invited by Beatles manager Brian Epstein to Liverpool, where he photographed the band's birthplace, the Cavern nightclub, in the best portrait of Beatlemania without any band members: four fabulous nobodies, their doe eyes blinking back the light.
After moving to Sydney in 1971, Morley, too, shrank from view, moving away from commercial portraits toward home interiors for magazines; from faces to people—less landscapes. Morley has called the Keeler shot an albatross, and in the random pictures Annear has artfully assembled in the final room—an Indian child glimpsed through a bootmaker's doorway, a whirling carousel backlit by the sun, a garden shed that appears like Doctor Who's time machine in a misty Paris garden—Morley seeks to transcend the defining image, a kind of freedom this exhibition finally grants him.
- Michael Fitzgerald
- The infamous woman's photo made him famous, but Lewis Morley finds just as much magic
in unknown faces and ordinary things
