I came across the American photographer Elsa Dorfman (1937 – 2020) whilst trying to find the Vivian Maier documentary Finding Vivian Maier on Netflix. As it was not available on I watched the Elsa Dorfman documentary The B-side: Elsa Dorfman’s Portrait Photography instead.

Prior to watching I had not heard of Elsa Dorfman but I found the film interesting and informative and thought that Dorfman was gentle and engaging. The film was principally about Dorfman’s portraiture shot using a 20′ x 24′ Polaroid camera, one of only half a dozen or so ever built.

Starting in 1980, Dorman began producing portraits using the camera, shooting two images per session. The subjects would chose the image they preferred and Dorfman would keep the other image which she referred to as the B-side. The documentary was an interesting exploration of the large format Polaroid, especially the challenges around the supply of film following the bankruptcy of Polaroid in the early 2000s, and Dorfman’s approach to portraiture.

As well as taking portraits, Dorfman also produced numerous self-portraits over the 35 years of using the large format Polaroid and it was whilst looking for one of these images, complete with Dorfman holding the cable release than I came across the news that she had died on the 30th May at the age of 83.

The above image is what I was originally looking for, an example of how the cable release sginifies that the sitter is both subject and photgrapher thereby informing the viewer that the image is a self-portrait. In this instance Dorfman usefully titled the image Myself, to remove any ambiguity.

Dorfman ususally captioned her images using Indian ink and a steel nibbed pen, therefore it is perhaps unsuprising that in an interview with the Boston Globe in 2017 when asked if she had an ambition to be a photographer when she was young she replied ‘Not a photographer, a writer!’

Dorfman was a resident of Cambridge, Massachusetts and her obituary in the Boston Globe can be found here.

Sources

Feeney, Mark (s.d.) Elsa Dorfman, photographer whose distinctive portraits illuminated her subjects and herself, dies at 83. At: https://www.bostonglobe.com/2020/05/30/metro/elsa-dorfman-photographer-whose-distinctive-portraits-illuminated-her-subjects-herself-dies-83/ (Accessed 02/06/2020).

Polaroid 20×24 camera (2020) At: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Polaroid_20%C3%9724_camera (Accessed 02/06/2020).