The exhibition 'Elvis at 21' is on display at the Boca Raton Museum of Art until June 13. (Photo courtesy Boca Raton Museum of Art)

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I have three favorite photographs of Elvis Presley. Two of them are in “Elvis at 21: Photographs by Alfred Wertheimer,” currently at the Boca Raton Museum of Art.

One shows Elvis on a train, staring straight at the camera, hands to his brow, with an unsettling clarity of expression. The other shows Elvis touching tongues with his girl for the day shortly before a Richmond, Va., concert.

She’s just said that he won’t be able to kiss her, and he’s working her. Needless to say, she’s about to lose the bet. The photo captures both his overt sexual aggression and his playfulness. Elvis made the girls shiver, just before he made them giggle.

Wertheimer was hired by RCA early in 1956 to get some publicity photos of their hot young rocker, and he shadowed Presley for perhaps six or seven days spread over a few months — taping The Steve Allen Show in New York, recording Hound Dog, concerts in Richmond and Memphis, back home with his parents. This is Elvis as the wave was picking him up and beginning to crest. He’s beautiful and innocent, and still has a boy’s softness.

The photographs show Presley ripping it up on stage or in the recording studio, desultorily reading his fan mail in a hotel room, pensively listening to his own music on a portable phonograph while riding in a train compartment, napping, effortlessly seducing anyone he wanted to.

(Photo courtesy Boca Raton Museum of Art)

In all of these shots, which support their large dimensions very well, he’s totally at ease — with his music, with women, with his place in the world. Lots of rock stars disappear in any medium but their own, but Elvis always came across.

The copy accompanying the photos is overly explicit and indulges in all sorts of rank hyperbole about how Elvis changed the world and “redefined American music.”

It would be more accurate to say that Elvis was the key transitional figure, the bridge over which black culture, i.e. rhythm and blues, was brought to white culture. The exhibit does point out that he bought a lot of his clothes at Lansky Brothers, a Memphis shop that mainly sold to blacks, which becomes obvious when you look at his concert wardrobe — black shirt, skinny white tie and a loose, almost zoot-suited jacket — it would have worked nicely for Chuck Berry.

Oh. The third photograph? It’s a behind-the-scenes shot from one of the moronic musicals Elvis was making in the 1960s. He’s in a bathing suit, posed in front of a process screen on which is projected ocean footage. He’s pretending to be water skiing, and off to the side there’s a hose that’s wetting him down.

The contrast between the absolute authenticity of character, place and emotion of Wertheimer’s photographs, and the plastic abyss into which Elvis vanished was and is heartbreaking.

The show at the Boca Museum gives us back the primal Elvis, raw and uncensored.

ELVIS AT 21: PHOTOGRAPHS BY ALFRED WERTHEIMER: Boca Raton Museum of Art through June 13. 501 Plaza Real, Mizner Park in Boca Raton. (561) 392-2500.