Bob Williams, longtime photographer for The Commercial Appeal, dies at 96
Bob Williams, a longtime photographer with The Commercial Appeal who enthusiastically chronicled the career of Elvis Presley, capturing the emerging King of Rock and Roll in what would become some of the singer’s most iconic poses and most revealing unguarded moments, has died.
Mr. Williams — whose camera’s eye also preserved some of the most significant events in the region’s civil rights struggle — died Wednesday at Baptist
Memorial Hospital-memphis, after a stay in hospice. He was 96.
As a staff photographer for the Memphis region’s preeminent daily newspaper, Mr. Williams had a seat in the front row of history — sometimes literally.
In 1955, he was in the front row at the Emmett Till trial, shooting pictures of the defendants and others in the Sumner, Mississippi, courthouse where two men eventually were acquitted in the lynching murder of Till, a 14-year-old Black boy from Chicago.
Mr. Williams also was on the Ole Miss campus when James Meredith, the school’s first Black student, was escorted to class by federal guards in 1962.
And when Dr. Martin Luther King Jr. was assassinated at the Lorraine Motel on April 4, 1968, Mr. Williams took the photograph from the bathroom window of the rooming house across the street that showed the vantage point of the killer, James Earl Ray.
Another famous shot by Mr. Williams, taken in 1968, when Memphis sanitation workers were on strike, revealed that Memphis mayor Henry Loeb kept a shotgun beneath his desk.
But Williams is best known for his Elvis portraits, some of which he took for the newspaper and some of which he took on his own time or for other other publications. He was among the first photographers to take an interest in the future superstar, shooting young Elvis and gaining the trust and friendship of the boy’s parents, Vernon and Gladys Presley, when the family still lived at 1414 Getwell.
He later shot the singer at his next house at 1034 Audubon Drive and then, of course, at Graceland, which Elvis bought in 1957, after he had become a recording artist for RCA.
“He got to be very good friends with them,” said Mr. Williams’ daughter, Paula Hartley, of Tulsa. “He would go and basically hang out. He took pictures of Elvis that are now iconic. Elvis in front of the gates of Graceland the day they were installed, before they were even painted. Elvis with his Rollsroyce.”
Mr. Williams also shot some of the first pictures of the infant Lisa Marie Presley, and took the beloved photograph of Elvis kissing his mother on the cheek the night before he left Memphis for his stint in the Army.
Some of Williams’ memorable Presley pictures captured the singer in humorous, off-the-cuff situations. In an often-reproduced 1956 image, the King stares into Williams’ lens as he becomes a smooch sandwich, a local beauty queen kissing each cheek.
Hartley said her father’s archive of Elvis-related photographs includes close to 3,000 images. She said many of these will appear in a book she and her father had been preparing before his death, which should be published before the end of the year.
A portrait photographer who turned to photojournalism while shooting pictures for the Air Force in World War II, Williams was hired at The Commercial Appeal in 1948, when he was 24 years old. He worked at Memphis’ preeminent daily newspaper for 33 years, retiring in 1982 as photo editor. He became interested in photography as a teenager in Amite, Louisiana, the small town where he was born.
During his career, Williams — sometimes credited as “Robert H. Williams” — shot just about every type of Memphis picture imaginable, and photographed almost every local notable and visiting celebrity. According to Hartley, he enjoyed shooting “feature” pictures more than news photographs. “He loved to know that he touched someone’s emotions somehow, with a picture that was humorous or sometimes sad or maybe even thought-provoking.”
She said her father met her mother when he got her to pose beneath a dogwood
“He took pictures of Elvis that are now iconic . ... Elvis with his Rolls-royce.” Paula Hartley
Daughter of Commercial Appeal photographer Bob Williams
tree for a picture intended to capture the arrival of spring. A romance bloomed along with the dogwood blossoms, and Bob and Jo Williams celebrated their 70th wedding anniversary in December. (Mrs. Williams turned 90 in February.)
As a freelancer, Mr. Williams developed creative photo concepts. When his son, David, was born in 1953, Mr. Williams shot pictures of him daily for a year, and Life magazine published the 365-image series in 1954. This, of course, was long before the current vogue, abetted by the ubiquity of digital cameras, for “A Year in the Life”type photo essays.
In another unique series, Mr. Williams photographed his daughter, Kristin, in an adult-sized one-piece swimsuit every year of her life, from infancy to age 16, by which time the suit fit perfectly. The series was published in People magazine in 1976.
Mr. Williams was a deacon at Germantown Baptist Church. In recent years, he and his wife had lived at the Kirby Pines Lifecare Community.
Mr. Williams leaves his wife, Jo Williams; a son, David R. Williams of Memphis; two daughters, Paula C. Hartley of Tulsa and Kristin Ammons of Shelby Forest, Tennessee; four grandchildren; and a step-granddaughter.
Memorial Park Funeral Home has charge. The family requests any donations be made to Samaritan’s Purse, a Christian charity.