Albert Watson, Graceland and Elvis Presley’s Gold Lamé Suit
In 1991, Albert Watson was given an unusual assignment by Rolling Stone.
The magazine was preparing its 25th anniversary issue, Heroes of Rock and Roll, and Watson was one of the photographers commissioned to create new work for it. His subjects included Mick Jagger, Chuck Berry and B.B. King.
But there was another assignment.
Graceland.
Elvis Presley had been dead for more than a decade, but Watson was given extraordinary access to his home in Memphis and four days to photograph the things he had left behind.
No Elvis.
No model.
Just the objects that had surrounded one of the most famous men in the world.
And among them was a gold suit hanging on a simple wooden hanger.
It would become the cover.
Four days inside Graceland
Watson has described how he spent days simply walking around Graceland, opening cupboards and drawers and deciding what interested him.
He photographed Elvis’s comb.
A monogrammed handkerchief from his bedside table.
His telephone.
Clothing.
Personal belongings that, removed from Elvis himself, might have appeared completely ordinary.
But that was exactly what interested Watson.
A comb is only a comb.
A telephone is only a telephone.
A suit on a hanger is only a suit on a hanger.
Until you know who it belonged to.
That shift in meaning became central to the photographs he made at Graceland.
The person is absent, yet somehow present everywhere.
The suit
Elvis’s famous gold lamé suit had been made in 1957 by Hollywood tailor Nudie Cohn, commissioned by Elvis’s manager Colonel Tom Parker.
It was not a modest outfit.
The complete ensemble included a gold jacket, trousers, shoes, tie and belt and cost $2,500, a considerable sum at the time.
Elvis wore the full suit during only a small number of performances in 1957. The trousers proved impractical for his famously energetic stage movements and the metallic finish was vulnerable to wear, so he increasingly performed in the gold jacket with darker trousers instead.
But by then, the image had already done its job.
Elvis in gold had become part of the mythology.
A version of the look appeared on the cover of his 1959 album 50,000,000 Elvis Fans Can’t Be Wrong: Elvis’ Gold Records, Volume 2, an image that would itself become one of the most recognisable album covers of the era.
More than thirty years later, Albert Watson encountered the suit at Graceland.
He did something remarkably simple.
He photographed it exactly as an object.
No Elvis impersonator.
No recreated stage.
No elaborate setting.
Just the suit.
Can a photograph of a suit be a portrait?
Watson has spoken many times about the importance of objects in his photography.
For him, the technical act of photographing a jacket hanging on a hanger is not particularly difficult.
The meaning is what matters.
When we look at this photograph, we do not really see a piece of clothing.
We see Elvis.
We imagine the movement, the performances, the screaming audiences and the extraordinary transformation of a young man from Tupelo into one of the most recognisable figures of the twentieth century.
And yet he is nowhere in the photograph.
In that sense, the image becomes a portrait without a person.
Perhaps an even more powerful one because we are left to fill in the missing figure ourselves.
Mick Jagger, Chuck Berry, B.B. King… and a suit
The Graceland photographs were part of a much larger Rolling Stone anniversary project.
Watson was photographing some of the defining figures in rock history, including Mick Jagger, Chuck Berry and B.B. King.
There were plenty of famous faces available for the cover.
Instead, Rolling Stone chose Elvis Presley’s empty gold suit.
That decision says something about the strength of Watson’s photograph.
Among portraits of living legends, an empty piece of clothing was enough.
The image became the cover of Rolling Stone’s 25th Anniversary Special in 1992.
Elvis had been gone for fifteen years.
He still filled the frame.
The photographer who looks beyond the face
Albert Watson is, of course, famous for photographing people.
Alfred Hitchcock holding a goose.
Mick Jagger transformed into a leopard.
Kate Moss.
David Bowie.
Steve Jobs.
But some of his most compelling photographs are not portraits in the conventional sense at all.
Throughout his career, Watson has photographed objects, landscapes, details and fragments with the same intensity that he brings to a human face.
The Graceland series is a particularly good example.
Rather than trying to recreate Elvis, Watson photographed the evidence of him.
The comb that touched his hair.
The telephone beside his bed.
The clothes that became part of his public image.
And the gold suit that had once contained the man himself.
The King, without the King
There is something strangely moving about seeing the suit empty.
On Elvis, it was theatre.
On the hanger, it becomes history.
The flamboyance is still there. The rhinestones, gold fabric and exaggerated tailoring have lost none of their visual impact.
But without the body inside, the photograph becomes quieter.
It is no longer a picture of performance.
It is a picture of what remains.
And perhaps that is why, out of an anniversary issue filled with some of the greatest names in rock and roll, this was the image that ended up on the cover.
Albert Watson photographed Elvis Presley without ever having Elvis in front of his camera.
He only needed the suit.
