In our last blog post, we shared our aim to improve the accessibility of the Lewis Morley Archive over the next year and provided an overview of Morley’s vast career, from photographing icons of 1960s London to his retirement years spent in New South Wales, Australia.
This month, we’re thrilled to be able to provide an update on this exciting cataloguing project and share some of the wonderful treasures found within the collection.
Cataloguing the Lewis Morley Archive
The Lewis Morley Archive comprises 103 boxes of material. It arrived unsorted, in non-archival boxes and was packaged with non-archival materials. This meant it was not very accessible to staff or researchers and needed some care to ensure its long-term preservation.
Our goal is to organise the archive into a sensible and useable arrangement, improve its storage and packaging materials, provide the items with a unique reference number and produce an accessible catalogue which can be viewed online by researchers.
So where does an Archives Cataloguer start when cataloguing this much material?
The first step is to write a project plan which outlines all the tasks which need to be undertaken, a timescale for each task and all the outcomes we want to achieve. The plan provides details about how we’ll work with our colleagues plus a variety of other steps we need to take along the way. After checking the archive for any hazards, we then need to make a basic inventory of material. To create a catalogue, we first need to make a box list.
Box listing involves filling in a spreadsheet template to capture some initial, basic information about the content of each box and helps us to make important cataloguing decisions, such as how the archive is arranged into series depending on the type of material it contains. It highlights any data protection issues, the extent and dates of material and the location of each box.
We’re making amazing progress and have captured this information about 65 boxes! Once box listing has been completed, we will be able to take that information and arrange the records into an accessible catalogue.
Highlights from the Lewis Morley Archive
The archive contains a wealth of material, from correspondence and exhibition materials to photographic prints, negatives, Polaroids and ephemera.
During the box listing phase, we’re able to delve deeper into the archive and discover some of its treasures. Below you can see some examples of the material within, showing the variety and scope of records within this fascinating collection.
Negatives
The archive is particularly rich in negatives, many of which are original negatives taken by Morley in the 1960s. Morley preferred to shoot in black and white, so the majority of the negatives are in this format, but he also used colour film on occasion. He arranged many of his negatives into folders, in alphabetical order and alongside small illustrative prints which help to show what is on the negatives at a glance. Some of the books also contain the original contact prints showing all images taken at each shoot. They cover themes such as portraits, fashion and reportage, especially in London and Paris.
Contact Prints
Lewis Morley was extremely prolific in the 1960s and photographed many rising stars, especially in his role as official photographer at Peter Cook’s The Establishment Club and for the Royal Court Theatre. He also took photographs for many other theatre companies, often producing images for playbills, lobbies and other promotional materials. Morley’s early contact prints reflect the hectic schedule of a working photographer—the negatives were hastily arranged on the sheet to quickly provide an overview of all shots and the contacts were annotated, sometimes cut into pieces and were passed around when needed.
Alan Bennett, Jonathan Miller) taken by Lewis Morley, 1961. © Lewis Morley Archive / Science Museum Group Collection
Photographic Proofs
Morley kept ‘proof’ versions of his photographs in small, spiral bound books and he would arrange these by theme. He could use these to show his portfolio of portraits, reportage photography or magazine shoots in easy to view sets which made it convenient for people or organisations to select photographs for potential reproduction requests or for display in gallery exhibitions. He would also annotate some of the images on the back so that he remembered dates, descriptions and locations.
Polaroids and Polaroid Transfers
In the 1970s, Lewis Morley emigrated to Australia with his family where he worked as a fashion and interior photographer for magazines such as ‘Pol’, ‘Belle’ and ‘Dolly’, among others. In the late 1980s Morley decided to retire from his professional career and instead dedicated his time to his hobbies experimenting with still life photography, linocuts and polaroid transfers. The archive contains many examples of Morley’s foray into Polaroid photography and his experimentation in Polaroid transfers. A Polaroid transfer is an image manipulation technique in which you transfer the image from a Polaroid instant print onto paper, wood or fabric by soaking it in hot water and transferring the image when wet. The archive contains many examples of these.
Be sure to check in again for our next update where we’ll share our progress cataloguing the Lewis Morley Archive and will explore in depth some items relating to the 1960s artist, actress and model Pauline Boty, one of Morley’s most popular portrait sitters.