For many fans, Elvis is omnipresent. They see his face, hear his music, feel his presence wherever they go. For us, Elvis is in Richmond, Virginia, or at least he will be. Elvis at 21: Photographs by Alfred Wertheimer will be making a stop at the Virginia Museum of Fine Arts on December 24, 2011. It's bit like a homecoming, really, since several of the 56 photos in the traveling exhibition were taken in the city.
I jumped at the opportunity to dig into the details of the Richmond pictures, a series that intimately chronicles a mere 24 hours in Elvis' young life.
The photo from that group that most intrigued me was one of Presley walking--sauntering--out of a local train station on a mid-summer day. It appears, on the surface, to be a serene photo. Elvis is the only person in the frame. The shadows and ripples on Elvis' stylish jacket accentuate the curve of his hips--those famous hips. It's just a single figure in motion with perfect light pouring in from every direction.
Of course, there's a story behind the image that contradicts the quiet. "Very early on the morning of June 30th, I arrived at the train station in Richmond," the photographer Alfred Wertheimer recalls. "A short while later, the train pulled in . . . Junior Smith was walking off the train with Elvis. Elvis took a look around, smiled, and turned on his little radio. It wasn't one of those huge boom boxes you'd see thirty years later, but an RCA Transistor 7 portable radio that had been given to him as a present . . . The next thing I saw was Elvis exiting the train station with his radio blaring."
I read that passage repeatedly. Each time, it was like adding a background score to a silent film. I could hear beats bouncing off the cold stone walls, mingled with the moderate pace of Elvis' footsteps, the photographer stepping hard to keep up just behind him.
I wanted to walk down that hallway with Elvis, to see what he may have seen, some 55 years ago. So, I set out to find this memorable corridor that Wertheimer's June 30, 1956, photograph had imprinted on my mind.
The scene was shot in Richmond, Virginia. How hard could it be to find the location? There are parts of this centuries-old capital city that look as they did 50, 75, even 100 years ago. I figured I had a fair chance of catching up with Elvis, but I had to know where to look first.
Clue #1: Richmond train station. Problem #1: Which one? For locals, it may have been a no brainer, but for a semi-outsider, it was a bit like looking for your car in a crammed holiday parking lot.
Jump to the next story in this series.
Comments