Where Did Priscilla Presley 60s Photoshoots Take Place?

There’s a softer, slower way I think about Priscilla’s 1960s photos: they map a relocation and a reinvention. Early shoots in Bad Nauheim show a very young girl in ordinary settings—porches, town streets, cozy rooms—because that was her real world before the move. After she joined Elvis in the States, the camera started following her into different registers: Graceland’s corridors and gardens provided a domestic backdrop for many informal portraits, while Los Angeles studios offered the polished, magazine-ready looks.

Photographers also captured her at cultural hotspots—Las Vegas lounges, Palm Springs retreats, and hotel suites—places that reflected the celebrity whirlpool she’d stepped into. On-location snaps tied to film productions sometimes added exotic touches, like seaside or resort imagery, whenever Elvis’s work took them away from home. What I like most is how the photos collectively tell a migration story: from quiet German snapshots to the flash of American showbiz, they read like pages from a life in motion, and that contrast always makes me linger over each frame.

You know how some faces feel like they belong to a dozen different backdrops? Priscilla’s 1960s photos capture that exact shift—she goes from a quiet teenage life in Germany to the glitz around Elvis in America, and the shoots reflect that travelogue. The earliest images from the late '50s and very early '60s that people often lump into her '60s era were taken in Bad Nauheim, the small German town where she lived while Elvis was stationed there. Those pictures have this innocent, everyday quality—park benches, local streets, and homey interiors—because that’s literally where she was living then. They’re intimate and domestic rather than studio-glamour shots.

Once she moved to the United States in 1963 and settled into life at Graceland, a lot of the portrait sessions and candid photography naturally happened around Memphis—Graceland’s grounds, the house’s interiors, and nearby locales. Press photographers and friends took many of the iconic domestic portraits there. Around the same time, as Elvis’s career pulled them into show business circuits, a significant chunk of publicity and magazine-style photoshoots occurred in Los Angeles. Hollywood studios, hotel suites, and Sunset Strip locations were common for more stylized, fashion-forward images. If you look at paparazzi and publicity photos from the mid-to-late '60s, you’ll see lots of hotel lobbies, studio backlots, and L.A. terraces—classic showbiz settings.

She also appears in photos taken during trips to Las Vegas and Palm Springs, spots Elvis frequented for performances and downtime, so photographers followed. And every so often, shoots happened on or near film sets and on-location shoots tied to Elvis’s movies—think Hawaiian or beachside vibes for tropical productions, or other locations where Elvis was working. Magazine spreads and promotional portraits were often done by commercial studios in Los Angeles or by freelance photographers who followed the couple on tour. I love how that variety traces her life story visually: from a German teenager to a young woman navigating fame—with snapshots that feel both private and staged. Looking through those images, you can almost hear the era’s soundtrack, and I always get a little nostalgic flipping through them.