Alfred Wertheimer: Elvis and the Birth of Rock and Roll

In early 1956, an RCA publicist asked legendary photographer Alfred Wertheimer to shoot a 21-year-old up-and-coming singer in Memphis named Elvis. “Elvis who?” Wertheimer stared blankly — but he took the assignment. How bewildered he would have been to know that the young man before his camera, to whom he was given unlimited access and of whom he’d take nearly 3,000 photos that year, would go on to become a legend, a heartbreaker, a catalyst for a new kind of consumer culture, a king of pop culture — THE King.

Wertheimer’s photographs from that year, along with a small selection of his rare 1958 pictures of the King being shipped off to an army base in Germany, are now revealed here: