Forty years after he passed, I’m still looking for Elvis. What set me on this path I do not know. My Nana saw him in the seventies, in Tuscaloosa. An enthusiastic documenter, I remember her showing me a photograph she had taken of him on stage—the King in powder blue, the same color as the Volkswagen Bug my parents had when I was very little.
Gates of Graceland, Tennessee, 2015 (Polaroid 600)
But that’s not what did it, because her Elvis was real. He breathed and ate and made bad jokes and you could take the night off and drive forty minutes to go see him on the Alabama campus. That person was long gone by the time I got my license in ‘91, even though legends still strode the earth, in various states of revival or decline.
No, I was hunting a ghost. And if you are looking for ghosts, you go to the places they haunt, where the people who loved them still live. And the all-time Ghost Capital of the World is Mississippi, U.S.A.
Tupelo, Mississippi, 2015 (Polaroid Land Camera)
There’s no such thing as taking a picture of a ghost head-on, so you always have to come at it sideways, in codes and signals; you look for the shadow cast from the tower. I am a devotee of the music of Elvis, as well as its influences and the music created in his wake. Like so much of the art created by musicians I love, the music stems from a very rural, very humble beginning. In the right light, or the right framing, it could still be the day they first walked up on a stage.
Former home of Mr. & Mrs. V.E. Presley, Tupelo, Miss., Feb. 7, 2015 (Polaroid Land Camera)
Azaleas at the former home of Mr. & Mrs. V.E. Presley, Tupelo, Miss., 2019 (Polaroid 600)
Most of the time what I’m looking for no longer exists. There’s nothing left of the cabin where Muddy Waters lived on the Stovall Plantation, just two plaques and a dead tree. We don’t even know where Robert Johnson is really buried. Elvis is in that rare category where he became so big, and the art he made so profound, that the places he lived and made music were (mostly) preserved.
The cradle of rock & roll, Memphis, Tennessee, 2019 (Polaroid SX-70)
(I say “mostly” because last year I took a trip with the photographer Katie Benjamin (also a ghost-hunter) to the site of American Studios, where Elvis made some of his most beautiful, vital music. It had been torn down; it’s now a Dollar General.)
You can actually go into the place where Elvis was born, the little house in Tupelo—and where he died, the big house in Memphis. It’s rare to get that intimacy with someone you actually know, let alone someone who contributed to the founding of a new genre of music, expanding its breadth and depth for twenty years.
Graceland, Tennessee, 2015 (Polaroid SX-70)
This is to say nothing of the planes or cars he owned or other places literally covered with the King’s face—or the side industry which, while much smaller than in my youth, still exists to keep the ghost floating.
Elvis Presley Boulevard, Memphis, Tenn., 2019 (Polaroid 600)
It’s a beautiful day so I’m going to grab my camera bag and listen to my current road-trip favorite—1970’s That’s the Way It Is. It’s studded with the type of dramatic pop songs that are coated in black eyeliner, like a version of “You Don’t Have to Say You Love Me,” which Dusty Springfield had knocked out of the park four years earlier, a symphonic juggernaut of heartbreak and loneliness.
You don’t have to stay forever, the ghost admits.
Left alone with just a memory
Life seems dead and quite unreal
All that’s left is loneliness there’s nothing left to feel
Believe me, the ghost sings, believe me.
AS ALWAYS I am gorjusjxn on Instagram and you can see more of my Polaroids (GHOST SQUARES) at McCartyPolaroids.