Newspaper Article

Obituary: Lewis Morley: Photographer of the famous and beautiful whose work came to embody the 1960s

Pepper, Terence

2013

Overview

The retrospective came about through a correspondence he and I began in 1983. [Lewis Frederick Morley] made regular donations of prints until I was able to fly to Australia to select a show from studying more than 10,000 negatives with him in the attic of his home in Sydney. In the year of the retrospective, the film Scandal was released, with Joanne Whalley playing [Christine Keeler] and copying the pose from Morley's portrait for the poster. This year, 50 years on from the Profumo affair - in which John Profumo, secretary of state for war, resigned after an affair with Keeler - Morley's only surviving vintage print of the photograph has been displayed at the National Portrait Gallery, with Gerald Scarfe's caricature of Harold Macmillan in another Keeler pose, in the Scandal 63 display. The chair now has a new home in the Victoria and Albert Museum's design collection. The Keeler photograph was taken in 1963 and had been intended to promote a film cashing in on the Profumo affair set up by Nicholas Luard and others, which Morley believed was never made. The Scandal 63 display shows its use in another film, made in Denmark, in which Keeler appears in a prologue and Yvonne Buckingham plays her part, with John Drew Barrymore as Stephen Ward. The film's posters use Morley's image with Buckingham's face superimposed. Later, Homer Simpson and the Spice Girls also re-enacted the pose. A 1960 Tatler commission, The Day of the Swot at Cambridge, included a photograph of William Donaldson, which led to Morley's de facto role as photographer of the satire boom and Private Eye's early days, especially when he moved his studio to the building in which Peter Cook ran the Establishment club in Soho. Donaldson produced Beyond the Fringe, which introduced Peter Cook, Dudley Moore, Alan Bennett and Jonathan Miller to the West End and Broadway. Morley's classic photograph of the four, posed against builders' screens, was the cover for the revue's bestselling album and became the prototype of a pop group's album cover - albeit that they were satirists.

• Publisher: Guardian News & Media Limited
• Subject: Cook, Peter / Keeler, Christine / Morley, Lewis Frederick