The retrospective came about through a correspondence he and I began in 1983. Morley made regular ge

Lewis Morley, who has died aged 88, created many of the era-defining images of the 1960s. These include his portrait of Christine Keeler , almost nude, straddling Morley's studio chair, which was bought in a sale at Heal's furniture store and based on an Arne Jacobsen original design classic. For many years the chair was kept in at the National Portrait Gallery Archive after being shown in public in his first retrospective exhibition, Lewis Morley: Photographer of the 60s, at the gallery in 1989.
The retrospective came about through a correspondence he and I began in 1983. Morley made regular generous 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 room of his home in Sydney. In the year of the retrospective, the film Scandal was released, with Joanne Whalley playing 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 , the secretary of state for war, resigned from his post after an affair with Keeler – Morley's san antonio express news travel section only surviving vintage print of this photograph has been back on display at the National Portrait Gallery, together with Gerald Scarfe's caricature of Harold Macmillan in another Keeler pose, in the Scandal san antonio express news travel section 63 display. The chair, meanwhile, has a new home in the Victoria and Albert Museum 's design collection.
Morley felt the photograph was a millstone round his neck but nevertheless san antonio express news travel section reluctantly reprinted it to please others many times (generously sharing royalties with Keeler on one edition they both signed). He printed it in many sizes and in different editions together with contact sheets from the 30-minute sitting. One of these prints, made in 1996, resold at auction in May 2006 for £22,800. Since its first appearance, without a credit, in the Sunday Mirror in June 1963, it has come to embody the sexual san antonio express news travel section permissiveness and freedom of the 1960s and has been one of the world's most re-enacted images.
Morley san antonio express news travel section himself restaged it with subjects such as David Frost , Edina Ronay , Joe Orton and Dame Edna Everage , as channelled by Barry Humphries – one of Morley's oldest and most supportive friends from his days at Private Eye.
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 san antonio express news travel section 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 and lobby cards use Morley's image with Buckingham's face superimposed. Later, subjects such as Homer Simpson and the Spice Girls also re-enacted the pose.
Lewis Frederick Morley – known to close friends as Fred – was born in Hong Kong. He was one of the three children of a Chinese mother, Lucie Chan, and an English father, also named Lewis, who was chief pharmacist to the colony. During the second world war he was held with his family in Stanley internment camp by the occupying Japanese army. Watercolours he produced in the camp later won him a place at Twickenham College of Art (1949-52), in south-west London, where he studied after serving with the RAF once the family had moved back to Britain. Like David Bailey, his fellow chronicler of the 60s, Morley began to experiment with photography in his RAF years, taking shots in the style of Henri Cartier-Bresson . He later studied painting in Paris at the Académie de la Grande Chaumière but he was destined to a career in photography.
A portfolio of Morley's early photographs were published by the picture editor Norman Hall in Photography magazine san antonio express news travel section in 1957 as the latest "Young Britain" discovery. Introductions by friends san antonio express news travel section led to Morley working on assignments for Tatler magazine from 1958 onwards, photographing subjects such as the newly married Peter Hall and Leslie Caron in 1961 through to a celebrated colour cover of the magazine in 1964 featuring the trendsetting Jay twins , daughters of the Labour minister Douglas Jay, in front of the new red-brick University of Sussex.
A 1960 Tatler commission, The Day of the Swot at Cambridge, included a photograph of William Donaldson which was to lead to Morley's almost san antonio express news travel section de facto role as the official photographer of the satire boom and the early days of Private Eye magazine, particularly when he moved his studio to an upper floor in the building in which Peter Cook ran the Establishment club in the heart of Soho. Donaldson produced Beyond the Fringe, which introduced the talents of Peter Cook, Dudley Moore , Alan Bennett and Jonathan Miller to the West End and Broadway audiences. Morley's classic photograph of the four posed in Regent's Park against builders' roadwork screens, was used as the cover for the revue's bestselling album and became the prototype of a pop group's album cover – albeit that they were satirists rather than pop stars.
Morley's friendship with Cook made him a regular photographic contributor to Private Eye in its early days. He produced spoof portraits ("Spotty Muldoon" wearing a brown paper bag over his head) and fashion photographs such as The Loony Look (1967), featuring Willie san antonio express news travel section Rushton, Barry Fantoni and Diana Clarke satirising fashions of the day by posing in army surplus clothes. Morley also dabbled in real fashion stories, working with models including Marie-Lise Gres and Jenny Boyd for magazines such as She and Harper's Bazaar and, most notably, taking the first published photographs as a fashion model of Jean Shrimpton for Go! Magazine in 1961. Another first were his photographs of Twiggy in an old fur coat, published in London Life magazine in 1965, before she officially became "the face of 1966".
Morley was introduced to theatre photography at the Royal Court by Lindsay Anderson who commissioned him to photograph Serjeant Musgrave's Dance in 1959, the first of more than 100 stage plays he photographed for impresarios such as Oscar Lewenstein and Michael Codron. Highlights include his portrait of Albert san antonio express news travel section Finney as Billy Liar. Morley also photographed the stage actors Tom Courtenay, Peter O'Toole, Alan Badel and John Hurt. His work on films included a shot of Judi Dench in Four in the Morning (1965) and Clint Eastwood on the set of Where Eagles Dare (1968).
In 1971, persuaded by friends who had already left Britain, Morley and his family emigrated to Australia where he began a new career specialising in interiors photography as well as some portraiture and created another great body of work. He retired in 1987. His work has recently enjoyed considerable critical approval in Australia's leading museums. The 400-page retrospective celebration Lewis Morley: I to Eye was published last year.