“Who is Elvis Presley?” Alfred Wertheimer asked when he received a call to photograph a young RCA recording artist in 1956.
It didn’t take long for him — and the world — to find out.
Wertheimer was only 26 and was scrambling to find work as a freelance photographer when he photographed Presley in 1956. He portrayed the 21-year-old on the cusp of fame, at the turning point when the tender-faced kid from Memphis, Tennessee, was becoming the king of rock ‘n’ roll. There are images of Elvis onstage, in the recording studio, reading fan mail, riding on trains, eating lunch and combing his hair.
And there is “The Kiss.”
In July 1956, Wertheimer saw Elvis and a flirtatious young woman embracing on a backstage staircase at the Mosque Theater in Richmond, Virginia. He took a few pictures in the half-light. Seeing a better angle, he walked past them, pretending to be a stagehand.
“Excuse me, coming through,” he said.
Wertheimer liked to shoot in shadows because he thought dark backgrounds were more revealing of character. The only light backstage, where Elvis and the young woman were standing, came from a nearby window.
“They were oblivious, didn’t even know I was there,” he told The Washington Post in 1997. “And she says to him, ‘I bet you can’t kiss me, Elvis,’ and sticks out her tongue, and he goes, ‘Bet I can,’ and sticks out his tongue and they barely touch.”
Wertheimer then took what might be the greatest photograph ever made of Elvis. It is private, sexy, voyeuristic and somehow eternal. It depicts him at the moment when there was still something innocent about him, yet something dangerous and exciting.
“He was just starting to gain a sense of his own stardom,” Wertheimer told the Los Angeles Times in 1979. “That’s what I think makes the pictures so interesting now. They capture that changing time in his life.”
In the seven days he spent with Elvis, Wertheimer took more than 3,000 images.
“When I think back,” he said in 1995, “this is probably the best work I ever did.”
Wertheimer was 84 when he died Oct. 19 at his home in New York. He had complications from a fall while visiting his native Germany, said Chris Murray, owner of Washington’s Govinda Gallery, where Wertheimer’s photographs have been exhibited.
No one else with a camera ever got so close to Elvis.
It began with a publicist’s phone call, asking Wertheimer to come to a television studio where Presley would perform on Tommy and Jimmy Dorsey’s “Stage Show” on March 17, 1956.
In late June, when Presley returned to New York to appear on “The Steve Allen Show,” Wertheimer was there with Nikon cameras. The next day, he followed Elvis to a studio, where he recorded “Hound Dog” and “Don’t Be Cruel.”
Then, with a simple “Mind if I tag along?” Wertheimer boarded a train with him for the journey back to Memphis. There were several stops along the way, including the unforgettable night in Richmond.
It was a time when Elvis could still stroll down streets unrecognized, browse unnoticed at newsstands and fall asleep on a train without being disturbed. He stood in line with other passengers to buy a brown-bag lunch at a depot in Alabama.
Wertheimer was there the whole time, close enough to photograph Elvis combing his hair, looking in a hand-held mirror the size of a playing card. In other pictures, Elvis eyes the pie display at a lunch counter and naps on a couch, his head resting on a stack of fan mail. He plays a spinet piano in a vacant studio.
“I learned that when somebody is doing something that is more important in their life to themselves than having their photograph taken,” Wertheimer told The Washington Post in 1997, “you’re going to get good pictures.”
Alfred Wertheimer was born Nov. 16, 1929, in Coburg, Germany. His family fled the Nazi regime in Germany in 1936 and settled in Brooklyn, New York, where his father worked as a butcher.
Wertheimer received his first camera as a gift from his older brother and graduated from the Cooper Union in New York in 1951. He served two years in the Army before launching his photography career.
He did publicity shots of other stars in the 1950s, including Lena Horne, Perry Como and classical pianist Arthur Rubinstein. He took a few more pictures of Elvis when he joined the Army in 1958, but by then he was one among hundreds of photographers.
It wasn’t until Presley died in 1977 that Wertheimer’s early images were rediscovered. In the meantime, he worked as a cinematographer and was one of the principal camera operators for the film documentary “Woodstock.” He then rented film-editing equipment until 1995, when he concentrated on marketing his images of Elvis.
He published several books of photographs, including “Elvis ’56” in 1979 and “Elvis at 21: New York to Memphis” in 2006. His photos toured the country in 2010 in an exhibition sponsored by the Smithsonian Institution.
He never married or had children.
In 2011, Vanity Fair magazine identified the woman in “The Kiss,” as Barbara Gray, who was known as Bobbi Owens in 1956. She and Elvis had spent the day together but, she said, the most intimate moment they shared was the kiss captured by Wertheimer’s camera.
“He made the girls cry — simple as that,” Wertheimer said, explaining the enduring power of Elvis. “Anybody who makes girls cry is getting below the level of the obvious — he’s getting to their hearts.”