© Michael Rothenstein estate

Rothenstein worked in both abstract and figurative styles and The Love Machine, which combines both, also indicates his Pop Art sympathies. It depicts a woman’s eye in which the photographer and his camera are reflected, surrounded by bands of metal strips stencilled in bright colours and is based upon a newspaper cutting showing the photographer Roger Murray Leach reflected in the eye of actress Sandra Fehre. Rothenstein believed that the image expressed ‘the conflict between what we see for ourselves and what the camera shows us’.