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    Elvis at 21: New York to Memphis
    Elvis at 21: New York to Memphis
    Elvis at 21: New York to Memphis
    Ebook384 pages1 hour

    Elvis at 21: New York to Memphis

    By Insight Editions

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    About this ebook

    In 1956, photographer Alfred Wertheimer was asked to photograph the then twenty-one-year-old Elvis Presley just as his career was about to explode. This book features the collection of photos taken by Wertheimer, offering a snapshot of the young Elvis Presley’s remarkable rise to fame and his permanent status as the “King of Rock ’n’ Roll.”       

    In 1956, Alfred Wertheimer was asked by Presley’s new label, RCA Victor, to photograph Elvis Presley’s budding career just as it was about to take off in a way the world had never seen. With unimpeded access to the young performer, Wertheimer captured unguarded and everyday moments in Elvis’s life during that crucial year. It was a year that took him from Tupelo, Mississippi, to the silver screen, the verge of international stardom, and his crowning as the “King of Rock 'n' Roll.” As Wertheimer photographed Elvis during 1956, and again in 1958, he created classic images that are spontaneous, unrehearsed, and without artifice.

    A PIVOTAL YEAR: Dubbed the “King of Rock ’n’ Roll” in 1956, 21-year-old Elvis, placed 17 songs on Billboard’s Top 100 singles chart, including 3 singles that reached #1, appeared multiple prime-time TV variety shows, performed 143 times in 79 different cities, and released his first film, Love Me Tender

    EXCLUSIVE PHOTOS: Dive into the complete collection of Alfred Wertheimer’s photos of the young Elvis Presley as he tours from New York to Memphis, Tennessee

    PERFECT FOR ALL ELVIS FANS: Fans of all ages will enjoy this exclusive deep dive into Elvis’s early life as he builds his career and shakes up the world of music

    GO BEHIND THE STAGE: Explore intimate and candid images captured after Elvis has left the building—backstage, writing, or reading fan mail from his admirers

    RENOWNED PHOTOGRAPHER AND AUTHOR: Experience the King of Rock ’n’ Roll through the lens of famed Alfred Wertheimer, the photographer who captured every moment of the young star’s early career
    LanguageEnglish
    PublisherInsight Editions
    Release dateJun 27, 2023
    ISBN9798886631685
    Elvis at 21: New York to Memphis
    Author

    Insight Editions

    Insight Editions is a pop-culture publisher based in San Rafael, CA.

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      Book preview

      Elvis at 21 - Insight Editions

      Elvis at 21: New York to Memphis, by Alfred Wertheimer.Elvis at 21: New York to Memphis, Text and Photography by Alfred Wertheimer, Foreword by Peter Guralnick, Introduction by Chris Murray. Insight Editions. San Rafael | Los Angeles | London.

      CONTENTS

      FOREWORD BY PETER GURALNICK

      INTRODUCTION BY CHRIS MURRAY

      STAGE SHOW, STUDIO 50

      THE STEVE ALLEN SHOW REHEARSAL

      MOSQUE THEATER, RICHMOND, VIRGINIA

      HUDSON THEATER, NEW YORK CITY

      RECORDING SESSION, STUDIO ONE

      FROM NEW YORK TO MEMPHIS

      HOME SWEET HOME

      RUSSWOOD PARK, MEMPHIS

      ACKNOWLEDGMENTS

      ABOUT THE AUTHORS

      foreword by PETER GURALNICK

      ART IS ABOUT CHOICES. The same scene presents itself to all of us. We are each given the same subject. It is in the selection of detail, what is included and what is left out, the angle of perception from which the scene is observed, that the true artist finds his or her own unique form of expression.

      What is so remarkable about Al Wertheimer’s documentary portrait of Elvis Presley, very much like the music of the artist it chronicles, is how fresh and contemporary the picture still seems, how utterly unlike any other portrait of this endlessly scrutinized figure. It is, clearly, not just a matter of access, for Wertheimer was with his subject for no more than a week all told on two separate occasions in 1956. Nor is it as if the photographer was being invited to record some momentous historic event. He was just there to photograph a couple of television appearances, on Jimmy and Tommy Dorsey’s Stage Show on March 17 and The Steve Allen Show on July 2, with the rehearsals attendant on each performance. Another photographer might simply have dismissed this as a not very challenging assignment about a not particularly interesting teenage fad. Another photographer might simply have taken it as an easy payday, an opportunity to snap a few dozen performance shots and move on as quickly as possible to the next job. Wertheimer saw the possibilities of the subject not because he was a fan (he had never even heard of Elvis when he was called by the record company two days before the first shoot), but because he was a keen student of human nature, because he was curious, because, like Elvis, he could be swept up by the purity of experience, by the unscripted eloquence of the moment.

      Wertheimer’s photography scrupulously reflected the William Carlos Williams dictum No ideas but in things. (Williams was the poet who famously wrote, So much depends upon a red wheel barrow.) When Wertheimer discovered Elvis alone at the piano in the corner of a blank high-ceilinged room, with sunlight hitting a disconsolate group of empty chairs, he saw it not as a symbol, not as the mythic logo for a generation, but as itself, as a powerful picture that could suggest multiple layers of moods and meanings. That there was actually someone else in the room at the time has no bearing on a striking aesthetic vision that demands attention strictly on its own terms. In the same way, Wertheimer took the recording session on the day after The Steve Allen Show not as the occasion for a pictorial news account of a mundane event (as it happened, Elvis recorded both Hound Dog and Don’t Be Cruel on that day) but as an opportunity to explore, through a series of sharply evocative images rendered in exquisite detail, the unrelenting concentration, joy, pain, and release of the creative act. And, following the session, he jumped on a train to Memphis with Elvis and his manager, Colonel Parker, not because he knew what was going to happen on the journey, but because he didn’t.

      Mind if I tag along? was his only security badge, Elvis’s shrug all the validation he needed. When Elvis goes into the bathroom to shave, the moment is recorded with the subject’s permission. The precise choreography of flirtation, the purchase of a ring from a worn-out-looking jewelry salesman, a transcendent instant on stage, grabbing a catnap on the train, an unrehearsed family reunion, all are captured, in true verité fashion, without the slightest hint of irony or visual comment. We are scarcely aware of the photographer, though he is always present. He never flinches. He never turns away.

      Al Wertheimer continued, of course, to take photographs; he went on to a distinguished career as a documentary filmmaker and cinematographer, but would never again, he has sometimes said, capture the moment in quite the same way—any more than his subject would. If he had been given the assignment two or three years later, he suggests wryly, he might have screwed it up by trying to improve on reality. But whether because, as he suggests, he simply didn’t know any better, or because, as his photographs show, he had a profound eye for the unmanipulated image, in this case he was content to simply leave matters alone. I learned that when somebody is doing something that is more important in his or her life than having their photograph taken, you’re going to get good pictures. He understates his achievement. He got great pictures. Like Elvis, by embracing spontaneity, by prizing feeling over mere technique, he found something new in familiar forms, and the result is work that can stand gloriously on its own, unaffected by the eddying tides of fashion or the shifting sands of time.

      introduction by CHRIS MURRAY

      BEFORE ELVIS, there was nothing.

      —JOHN LENNON

      ALFRED WERTHEIMER’S PHOTOGRAPHS OF ELVIS Presley are a national treasure. They are a unique visual record of the most exciting and influential performer of our time. Taken in 1956, Wertheimer’s photographs document Elvis Presley at the quintessential moment of his explosive appearance onto the cultural landscape. After the photos in this book were taken, no photographer ever again had the access to Elvis that Wertheimer enjoyed. Wertheimer has described his photographs as the first and last look at the day-to-day life of Elvis Presley. Apart from Elvis’s own recordings from this period, Wertheimer’s photographs are the most compelling vintage document of Elvis in 1956, a very special year for the young man from Memphis who was about to shake up the world. Elvis at 21: New York to Memphis is an extraordinary record of how these two storytellers’

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