David Wharton Photography: Elvis Culture

I understand that Elvis changed the face of American culture in the mid-1950s. The music he made was a hybrid of earlier kinds of southern music but also something new, not exactly like anything anyone had heard before. As a performer and recording artist, he carried that music and its constituent southern forms beyond the region and spread them throughout the nation (and, eventually, the world). As an entertainer, he galvanized a generation, creating an entirely new type of youth culture. In doing so, he planted seeds of rebellion among his teenage listeners against the largely conformist postwar values of their parents. I understand all that.

What I don’t understand is the devotion Elvis and his life have inspired among people too young, or too far removed, to have experienced any of that firsthand. Anyone who was 16 in 1956 is 70 now, yet most of the people who flock to Graceland in mid-August every year to mark the anniversary of Elvis’s death are considerably younger than that. Many of them, in fact, were not even born in 1977, when Elvis died. Obviously, something larger than just one man’s life—no matter how big that life was—draws them there. I just don’t quite understand what it is.

Even though I don’t understand it, I am nonetheless fascinated by it. I live only 70 miles from Memphis and have gone to Graceland on August 16 several times in the last ten years. I go there to photograph—not so much to make pictures of people many might think of as unusual, but to try to understand. For me, photography is a way of finding things out, a way to explore. I’m less interested in photographing things I already know about (or think I know about) than using a camera to look at things I don’t understand. And that includes what goes on at Graceland in mid-August every year.