Excuse me, coming through,” he said.

Mr. Wertheimer liked to shoot in shadows because he thought dark backgrounds were more revealing of character. The only light backstage, where Elvis and the young woman were standing, came from a nearby window.

“They were oblivious, didn’t even know I was there,” he told The Washington Post in 1997. “And she says to him, ‘I bet you can’t kiss me, Elvis,’ and sticks out her tongue, and he goes, ‘Bet I can,’ and sticks out his tongue and they barely touch.”

Mr. Wertheimer then took what might be the greatest photograph ever made of Elvis. It is private, sexy, voyeuristic and somehow eternal. It depicts him at the moment when there was still something innocent about him, yet something dangerous and exciting.

“He was just starting to gain a sense of his own stardom,” Mr. Wertheimer told the Los Angeles Times in 1979. “That’s what I think makes the pictures so interesting now. They capture that changing time in his life.” Source: the Washington post