Piper’s broad experimentation of media continued into the 1960s, where in 1966 he exhibited a series of collaged figurative works known as the Eye and Camera, alongside works by Sidney Nolan and Ceri Richards at London’s Marlborough Fine Art gallery. In a dramatic shift from his typical subject matter, Piper brought together fragmented and repeated images of semi-naked women (his wife Myfanwy, the nameless muse), layered over drawn or painted coloured backgrounds. The provocative subject matter shocked his regular audience and reviewers however, Piper’s real intention was to explore and question the concept of the multiple, and the status of photography as a serious medium in the art world which at the time was considered ‘second rate’.

Developing his own photographs at his Buckinghamshire studio at Fawley Bottom, Piper championed the importance of this medium in exploring new concepts and visualising his paintings and drawings from a unique perspective. He commented, ‘The photographs are all my own, sometimes preceding the drawn or collaged areas, sometimes being posed and taken after a drawn idea has been put down on paper’ (J. Piper quoted in D. Fraser Jenkins and H. Fowler Wright, The Art of John Piper, London, 2015, p. 350). The repetition of imagery and combination of this medium with his drawings (and later screenprints of these collages) further intentionally blurred the lines of the ‘original’ likening Piper’s avant-garde approach to that of the emerging Pop Art movement.