Elvis! By Dagmar

Last month a new photo book was released by Always Elvis in Austria, simply titled “Elvis!” By Dagmar. Since it is covering 3 days of the September 1970 tour, we were anxious to see it.

Design

The book is soft cover, printed on glossy paper. Unfortunately the choice for the fontstyle - italics, with lots of capitals - makes the text a bit uneasy on the eye. The picture quality is good, disregarding the fact that the pictures themselves are sometimes not too good, but since it is mainly a picture book, that fact belongs more to the content.

Content

The text is very well written, and it is great to read the experiences of a professional photographer turning into a fan while doing her job. Obviously it’s written from the heart, which is great, but on the other hand it causes some errors (not mentioning Elvis’ 1961 benefit concerts, stating that Elvis performed in black leather in the 50’s, some wrong song titles). Those errors are not huge, and hard core fans will recognise them immediately, but accuracy could have given a finishing touch to the text. Adding a German version of the text might give a bit wider audience to the book, but to most fans it will make the book unnecessary more expensive.

As said before, the book is mainly a photo book, and what kind of?! As we all know Elvis hardly looked better than in 1970, sitting on top of the world. But seeing all these photos (over 130) collected in one book is just stunning. Some of the pictures, especially some of the coloured ones and the latter pictures in the book, are a bit too dark (or red), but just having them is still marvellous. The ones that are sharp (by far the majority), are paralysing the viewer, one will hardly be able to turn the pages. In opposition to a lot of other photo books about just one show or tour, this book never gets boring. Of course it has to do with the way the pictures were taken, but the state of the subject is at least half of it!

Conclusion

This is without any doubt one of the best books focussing on a short period of time. Every Elvis (70’s) fan should have it in his or her collection. Unfortunately we are not able to share some of the pictures as wallpaper or picture of the week, since we had to pay for that. At least the author was straight about that, unlike some others that profit from free extra publicity first and then start complaining about the use of “their” pictures. We like to thank Elvis Unlimited for supplying us with the review copy.