Govinda Gallery

“The train coming up north was a slow one, but we finally arrived in New York on July 1st. Elvis, Scotty, DJ, and Bill Black, along with the Colonel, Tom Diskin, and myself, got off at Penn Station around seven-thirty in the morning. Passing a newspaper stand, Elvis saw a headline about 127 people killed in an airplane crash. Two planes had collided over the Grand Canyon in the largest air disaster ever in the United States at the time. Elvis picked up a copy of the Sunday Mirror, which had pictures of two of the stewardesses on the cover, and was completely preoccupied with this story. He walked through the station totally oblivious to everything else that was going on around him.”

Those are Alfred Wertheimer’s words I recorded describing that first day in July 1956, during his travels photographing a 21 year old Elvis Presley. Alfred Wertheimer would be 89 years old today. The 20 years I worked with Alfred exhibiting his photos in galleries and museums and publishing four books of his truly remarkable photos were a treasured two decades of collaborating together.