The B-Side: Elsa Dorfman's Portrait Photography

For more than 30 years, Elsa Dorfman (b. 1937) photographed both famous and unknown subjects using a rare large-format Polaroid camera at her studio in Cambridge, Massachusetts. Now Polaroid has stopped making the film, and as Dorfman is approaching retirement, she gives friend and filmmaker Errol Morris a tour of her wide-ranging archive. It largely consists of what she describes as “B-sides”: in each session she took two photographs, the better of which her subject would take home. There are portraits of a wide variety of distinguished figures, including her good friend the beat poet Allen Ginsberg, along with the other writers, poets and musicians with whom she surrounded herself in her youth. She also photographed herself and her family. Dorfman reminisces as she leafs through the thousands of 20x24-inch Polaroid photos, each of which has a story attached. Her subjects, invariably smiling against a white background in these uncomplicatedly superficial pictures, seem to reflect Dorfman’s amiable, optimistic personality.