They’d put him in prison for taking a photograph.

There’d been no trial, no jury, no explanation, just the slam of iron bars echoing off stone walls and a number in place of his name.

He never saw anyone but the guards, but he could sometimes hear the other prisoners yelling, screaming, crying. He wondered if they could hear him talking to the rusty faucet that dripped away in his cell.

A nagging fear in the back of his mind said that made him crazy. He preferred to think it was keeping him sane.

He’d taken the black and white snapshot while visiting Graceland. A van with blacked out windows at the side of the house had caught his attention. He lifted his camera over the wall, and changed his life for ever.

The picture was of Elvis, leaving the building, mere hours before he supposedly died.

He didn’t know this until he developed the picture, and he never fully understood what it meant – only that a few hours later men in dark suits were kicking in his door because of it.

They’d hidden him away so he couldn’t tell anyone what he knew: that the King was still alive.

Memphis Note
The fringe theories about Elvis’s end range from him faking his death, to aliens taking him, to mob assassination to all sorts of weirdness involving the US government. It’s given the tabloids headline fuel for decades, and have helped keep him in the public eye in a way his music never would have. His music doesn’t scream crazy, after all.

I’ll admit when we rolled up to the photo shoot for the album cover, I might’ve partaken a bit too much on the way over.

But, that’s just ‘cause I got excited an’ all. I’d finally made it, the labels had picked me and I was gonna be the next big thing.

“Playa’ has arrived! Where the ladies at!” I shouted as I walked into the warehouse-sized photo stage. A semi-circular green screen hung from floor to ceiling.

“Shot them earlier. Don’t need all of you here at once.” Said the photographer, fiddling with the buttons on his camera.

“But the Bentley stretch limousine, that’s here right?” I asked, my mellow suddenly fading.

“Did that, too. We’ll put it all together later in Photoshop. Stand on the X over there, please.” He pointed at a duct tape cross near the green screen.

“That seems kinda, ya know, dishonest.”

A stage hand walked over and gave me a fan of hundred dollars bills. They were fake, only printed on one side, and taped together to hold their fan.

“Welcome to the rap game!” smirked the photographer. “Now let’s get to it, got three more shoots just like this today.”

Memphis Note
I’ve got a friend that’s a local rapper, been working at it for years and years. He once told me how he hated all that stereotypical crap they put on the covers of start rap records. Girls, cars, money, jewelry, explosions, all of it faked with a computer. Catch was, people didn’t buy your record if you didn’t have that stuff on it. It was the catch-22 of underground rap.

Rain beat down on the roof of the dark sedan, the droplets sounding like the snare drum Ernest Withers used to march to back in the service. All those years ago, when things were so much simpler. When his photographs, and only his photographs, were the thing that mattered.

“Oh, don’t be like that, Ernest.” Said FBI Agent Lowe from the driver seat, eyes shooting back at Ernest through the rear view mirror. “We’ve been over this. It’s just like taking your pictures. They’re just subjects, and you’re just letting us know if happenstance brings you anything interesting.”

“You’re helping us to clarify things.” Followed up Lawrence, the other agent, giving an arthritic thumbs up. “So we can leave your people alone.”

“Our people?” Muttered Ernest, without thinking.

“What? What was that?” Snapped back Agent Lowe.

“They’re our people.” Ernest said, this time so they could hear him. “Yours and mine. They’re Americans. They’re not some Communists come to take our freedom. They don’t have to be. We’re doing it for them. We’re the spies here. We’re the traitors.”

Then Ernest Withers stepped out into the rain, knowing that it wouldn’t wash him clean, but still praying all the same.

Memphis Note
Ernest Withers was a photographer during the Civil Rights Movement, probably the photographer of the Civil Rights Movement. But, he was also an informant for the FBI, and an ex-cop that got busted for taking a bribe. No one is ever as simple as historians want them to seem, and Ernest was no exception. He wasn’t a sinner or a saint, just a man trying to get by and keep his family fed.

She spat on the grave. And then the rain started, as it is wont to do when a spurred lover stands alone over her dead partner’s grave.

In her hands, a glossy photograph flaps in the wind.

“Dammit, Will.”

The photograph is of them. It is in blinding color, over-saturated, perfectly composed for that half second of life between shutter opening and closing.

They are standing at one of his openings. Before one of his photographs. Her arm is around him, but his is not around her.

No one ever knew they were together. He told her that he kept too many public lovers; she told him that it didn’t matter. But, regardless of what either of them said, it always did.

She puts the photograph back into her purse, and swings the camera draped around her shoulder into her hands. Holding a hand over the lens to mask it against the falling rain, she presses the shutter button.

“You were always a bastard. But you’ll always be my bastard.”

The shutter clicks. It’s a picture of his headstone. A perfect capture of the austere grey of the day.

She’s shooting black and white, in opposition to their color.

Memphis Note
William Eggleston was born and lived in Memphis, Tennessee. More than any other photographer, he is credited with bringing color photography into the norm of both art and commercial consumption. He currently lives in Memphis, in declining health, and complicated circumstances.