Elvis

In 1956, a twenty-one-year-old singer named Elvis Presley was at the beginning of his remarkable career. Alfred Wertheimer, a young New York photojournalist, was asked by Elvis’s new label, RCA Victor, to photograph their new artist. In the course of his one-day assignment for RCA, Wertheimer was struck by the stunningly photogenic performer and felt compelled to continue documenting the everyday moments in Elvis’s life during that crucial year.

Wertheimer’s unobtrusive photographs of Elvis in performance, with his fans, in the recording studio, and at home with his family present a unique look at one of the world’s most famous cultural figures. These images were the first and the last unguarded look at Elvis, and also constitute an important visual document of post–World War II America.

With hundreds of gorgeously reproduced high-quality prints, Elvis is the result of a special alchemy between an exceptionally talented photographer and a charismatic young man on the brink of superstardom.

Alfred Wertheimer, began his career as a photojournalist in 1951, publishing work in such magazines as Life and Colliers. His photographs are in the permanent collections of the Experience Music Project (Seattle, Washington) and the Folkwang Museum (Essen, Germany). He has photographed such notables as Eleanor Roosevelt, Leonard Bernstein, and Elizabeth Taylor, and worked as a principal cameraman for the documentary Woodstock.

Chris Murray, founder and director of Govinda Gallery in Washington, D.C., has organized more than two hundred exhibitions of many leading artists and edited a number of books on music and photography. Since 1995, Murray has featured Wertheimer’s work in several exhibitions, including his first major one-person exhibition in 1997 at Govinda Gallery and the exhibition Artist to Icon: Early Photographs of Elvis, Dylan, and the Beatles, organized in conjunction with the Experience Music Project in 2001.

Peter Guralnick is America’s foremost writer of music biographies. In a career spanning over thirty years, Guralnick has written extensively about American music and musicians, including the two-volume, prize-winning Presley biography, Last Train to Memphis (1994) and Careless Love (1997).