Elvis has returned to the building – the Smithsonian’s National Portrait Gallery building -- for “Elvis at 21: Photographs by Alfred Wertheimer”, candid shots giving a rare, intimate view of his dazzling emergence as a star.

The just-opened, free "Elvis at 21" photographs are the first, and last, unguarded look at Elvis.

He rose to fame within one year, his 21st year – January 1956 to January 1957.

This exhibit, which opened October 23, is the National Portrait Gallery's (NPG) second Elvis show this year, when the King would have turned 75 on January 8.

The Wertheimer photos capture a 21-year-old, bare-chested, French-kissing, contemplative Elvis, even petting a top hat-wearing basset hound, just before Presley soared to stardom.

"Elvis hip-swung postwar American culture out of complacency…he altered the beat of everyday life. The world changed,” says NPG historian Amy Henderson.

Wertheimer, a 26-year-old freelance photographer whose work had appeared in "Life" and "Paris Match", was hired by RCA Victor in 1956 to shoot promotional images of the recently signed recording artist.

Wertheimer had unparalleled access to Presley, and documented him on the road, backstage, in concert, in the recording studio, and at home in Memphis. Soon afterward, Elvis' infamous manager, “Colonel” Tom Parker, made sure that no photographer was ever allowed similar intimate access.

Here’re some highlights of the photos, which you can see by clicking here:

• After a shower, and still bare-chested, Elvis and his high school sweetheart, Barbara Hearn, listen on a phonograph to the acetate disc with cuts of his songs from an early New York recording session.
• Elvis kisses a young woman repeatedly in the stairwell of a Richmond, VA theater during his show’s intermission. Wertheimer worried about invading Elvis’ privacy, but “Elvis couldn’t have cared less; his focus was entirely on giving this girl a kiss.”
• Curled on a couch, Elvis reads fan mail, tears each one to shreds, then naps. Wertheimer asked him why he tore them up, and Elvis replied, “’I’ve …seen what’s in them. It’s nobody else’s business.'”
• Various sensual hip-gyrating shots show part of what made him famous. “He would listen respectfully backstage to criticism from agents that wanted him to contain his movements on stage,” Wertheimer said. “But once Elvis got on stage, he always did it his way.”
• Elvis sits cross-legged on the floor while listening in deep concentration to the playback of “Don’t Be Cruel” at the seminal recording session on July 2, 1956. The flip side, “Hound Dog”, took two hours and 31 takes before Elvis grinned and said, “This is the one.” Both reached #1 on the charts – the first and only time that a single record would ever achieve that.
• Elvis eating at a Tennessee segregated lunch counter, with an African-American woman standing nearby. His early songs had such a black sound, that in the South, they were played initially only on stations that featured music by and for African Americans.

The exhibit will be at the NPG through January 23, and then will travel through 2012.

“Elvis at 21: Photographs by Alfred Wertheimer” was developed by NPG, the Smithsonian Institution Traveling Exhibition Service (SITES), and Washington's Govinda Gallery. The exhibit is sponsored nationally by the History Channel.

Three publications accompany the fascinating exhibition: "Elvis at 21: Photographs by Alfred Wertheimer", its brochure, with free download; "Elvis at 21: New York to Memphis" (Insight Editions); "Elvis 1956: Photographs by Alfred Wertheimer" (Welcome Books).

You will love this tender.

For more info: National Portrait Gallery, www.npg.si.edu, 800 F Street, NW, Washington, DC, 202-633-8300.