Elvis. Long Lost Photos. Rediscovered.
NEVER TO BE REPRINTED IN the World.
THE NIGHT EVERYTHING CHANGED
On October 28, 1956, twenty-two-year-old professional photographer Richard Weede stepped into the CBS television studios in New York. His father, famed opera baritone and Broadway star Robert Weede, was appearing on The Ed Sullivan Show that night with the cast of The Most Happy Fella. Armed with permission from CBS brass, a handheld camera, and available light, the younger Weede spent the day backstage capturing candid moments of every performer on set.
Among those performers was an up-and-coming music idol: Elvis Presley, preparing for his second appearance on the famous variety program.
Richard barely noticed him: "I had been raised in and around the world of musical theater and opera. It was not unusual for me to come home from school and find my father giving singing lessons to the likes of Mario Lanza. I didn't even really know who Elvis was at the time,” Richard Weede recounted.
But he pointed his camera anyway.
The Rebel
Ed Sullivan had re-invited Elvis Presley to appear on his show with no small amount of reluctance.
Network censors and Sullivan himself were acutely aware of the national uproar surrounding Presley's hips. Desperate to maintain wholesome family programming, they pleaded with the young rebel to restrain his performance, and Elvis looked them in the eye, smiled, and agreed.
Then the cameras went live to 60 million Americans… and Elvis Presley did exactly what Elvis Presley always did.
By all reports, Sullivan was less than amused; and by Presley’s third Sullivan appearance in January 1957, network cameramen were strictly instructed to shoot him only from the waist up; Ed would take no more chances on hijinks from the irreverent young megastar.
Weede spent hours backstage observing this cultural friction, documenting the quiet moments leading up to the historic broadcast. He captured Ed Sullivan with his back turned, leaning in to lecture the young megastar, while Presley looked on with a telling expression. It was an unfiltered pictorial essay on censorship and youth culture in mid-century America.
"Little did I realize at the time I was capturing a truly unique moment in rock and roll history involving arguably the most famous music icon of his or any other generation," Weede later remarked, reflecting on that day.
what became of these historic photographs?
Raised around classical opera singers, Weede was not a fan of rock 'n' roll. He did not fully grasp who Elvis was about to become. After developing only a few initial prints, Weede placed the prints and original medium-format film scans and negatives into separate boxes. Those boxes were stashed away among fifty years of accumulated commercial work inside his garage. There they languished, unseen and unpublished, for 51 years.
"I had been raised in and around the world of musical theater and opera. It was not unusual for me to come home from school and find my father giving singing lessons to the likes of Mario Lanza. I didn't even really know who Elvis was at the time and I certainly had no great affection for songs such as ‘Hound Dog.’ If I had known then what I know now, who Elvis Presley was about to become, obviously I would have shot roll after roll of the young star,” Weede recalled.
THE DISCOVERY
In early February 2007, a chance conversation changed everything. Weede’s son was talking music with a friend whose 11-year-old daughter was a devoted Elvis fan, and they talked about how the King had managed to transcend generations with his enormous talent and charisma. Weede's son replied that his father had taken some photographs of Elvis during one of his appearances on the Ed Sullivan show and that he believed they were lying around somewhere.
Intrigued to say the least, the friend asked if he might view the photos. Weede's son rummaged through a stack of clutter around the kitchen table and produced a tattered manila envelope that was worn, creased, and utterly unremarkable from the outside.
When his friend examined the contents of the package his eyes nearly popped out of his head. In his hands was a treasure trove of rock legend in the making. Anybody who ever knew anything about Elvis had heard of the Sullivan shows and how they had defined Presley as the original, quintessential, bad boy rockabilly rebel.
After convincing Richard Weede that what he had was genuinely extraordinary, and not to mention genuinely valuable, he was persuaded to go back into the garage to search the archives and to find what else might be buried in those boxes.
Over the following months, more and more photos were recovered from the boxed archives in his garage. But the original negatives — the most critical piece of the entire collection — remained missing.
The FIRE
In late October 2007, disaster struck.
The worst wildfires in California history exploded across the landscape. Hundreds of thousands of acres consumed. Several thousand homes were reduced to ash and ember. More than 1.5 million Southern California residents under mandatory evacuation orders, told to take what they could carry and run.
Richard Weede's home in Escondido was at the epicenter of the inferno.
October 21st. 11:30 at night.
The phone rang: You have one hour.
The flames were already cresting the hill behind their house, driven by fierce Santa Ana winds that turned the night sky the color of blood. Richard and his wife Peggy moved their two horses to safety first. Then they packed what little they could into the car.
Richard stopped.
With the fire closing in, and with everything they had built together potentially minutes from burning to nothing, he turned to Peggy and said they needed to make one last search: The negatives. They had to try.
Box after box. Hands moving fast. The smell of smoke is getting closer. The sky getting brighter in the wrong direction.
And then, at the bottom of the very last box they had time to search before fleeing into the night… They found them.
THE MIRACLE
A little more than a week later, when the worst of the fires were at last contained, they were allowed back up the hill to their homesite to survey the damage. Nearly every home in the neighborhood had burned to the ground, as had their horse barn and tool shed. Their house, though suffering extensive smoke and water damage, remained standing. Smoke-damaged, water damaged, wounded... but standing.
"We had a home to come back to. And we found Elvis. Some things were just meant to be," said Weede.
WHAT EXISTS TODAY: The “Making History” Collection
Rescued from fire; hidden for 51 years. Captured by a man who had no idea he was standing next to history. Never before seen, never before published. Never before available to anyone anywhere in the world.
“It is amazing to me the photos I managed to create are now being regarded as a pictorial essay of a seminal moment in rock and roll history, as well as a commentary on censorship in America at that time. The series of shots where Ed has his back to the camera and is leaning toward Elvis obviously lecturing him and the expression on Elvis's face proves once again that a picture can be worth a thousand words," said Weede.
Each set in the Making History collection is a strictly limited edition fine art print, authenticated, preserved, and presented with a Certificate of Authenticity and white cotton gloves for proper handling. These are not reproductions. These are not new prints of famous images; these are the real, original moments from that iconic day.
"The image is one thing, and the human being is another. It's very hard to live up to an image."
— Elvis Presley
