I was reading the New York Times recently and stumbled across something I had not expected: an obituary that Elsa Dorfman. It was sad news for me, as I had loosely followed her and had grown to respect her as an individual and a photographer over the course of a decade.
For those unfamiliar with her, Elsa Dorfman was a Boston-based portrait photographer known primarily for her work with a 20 X 24 inch Polaroid. This is a pretty specialized camera that weighs a couple of hundred pounds. It uses film, specifically Polaroid film, the stuff that develops as you peel back a layer and wave it around. It’s not a very versatile camera. You can’t really use it for sports, wildlife or anywhere you need to move around quickly. It has one purpose: to take highly detailed prints using 20 X 24 Polaroid film. It is a highly specialized beast, made even more rare by the fact that Polaroid no longer makes this film. She used that to take portraits of hundreds of individuals in the Boston area.
I have to say I was initially unimpressed with her as a photographer when I first heard of her. In my mind, Polaroids were for amateurs, people who couldn’t figure out how to work a real camera. I dismissed the work outright only because of the camera it came from, not the thought process that went behind producing the image.
It turns out that Elsa Dorfman was a photographer who put a lot of thought behind her craft. She wrote a series of essays on photography as a form of personal expression and described her approach through these essays.
One essay broadly traces the story of Barry Gerstein, a Boston man who terrorized and assaulted women with a gun and a camera in the early 1980s. She used this man’s experience to write an essay about the camera both the basis for a relationship with the sitter and its potential as an instrument of humiliation and terror. Dorfman understood the power of the camera. She let her subjects know that she would not betray their trust by misusing that power.
She never wanted to cover wars or famine or to use portraiture to probe under the facade that most of us project to others. She used her camera to manage overwhelming feelings or frightening emotions. Elsa Dorfman never coerced her subjects to do anything they were uncomfortable with. She approached her subjects as presented and did not want to change or transform them into something they were not.
She stayed in familiar territory and accepted people as they presented themselves. Many of them were friends she knew well. “I’m not an adventurer; by nature, I am bonded to my turf,” she wrote. I think she covered that turf pretty well over the course of a lifetime.
“The impetus for my photography is not intellectual. I don’t want to see the world as fresh and strange. I want to see it as welcoming and possible. I use my camera to simplify the world and bind me to it. My camera helps me make sense of my experience and eases the loneliness that is part of being human.” — Elsa Dorfman
You can read more about her from her webpage, listed here. As I read through these essays, my perception of her has changed dramatically. You have to admire her persistence, patience, tenacity and implicit empathy as a photographer and a human being. She worked to understand, accept and present people in their most favorable light. In these days of anger, resentment, cynicism and outright hate, we can use more people like her.