Elsa Dorfman

Elsa B. Dorfman (April 26, 1937 – May 30, 2020) was an American portrait photographer. She worked in Cambridge, Massachusetts, and was known for her use of a large-format instant Polaroid camera.

Early life and education Dorfman was born in Cambridge, Massachusetts, on April 26, 1937, and was raised in Roxbury and Newton. She was the eldest of three daughters of Arthur and Elaine (Kovitz). Her father worked at a grocery chain as a produce buyer; her mother was a housewife. She studied at Tufts University, where she majored in French literature. During her junior year, she went on exchange to Europe, where she worked in Brussels for Expo 58 and lived in Paris, living in the same student accommodation as Susan Sontag. When she returned to Boston, she pursued a master's degree in elementary education at Boston College.

Career After earning her master's degree, Dorfman spent a year teaching fifth grade at a school in Concord. In May 1968, she moved into the Flagg Street house which would become the basis of her Housebook.

Dorfman's principal published work, originally published in 1974, was Elsa's Housebook – A Woman's Photojournal, a photographic record of family and friends who visited her in Cambridge when she lived there during the late 1960s and early 1970s. Many well known people, especially literary figures associated with the Beat Generation, are prominent in the book, including Lawrence Ferlinghetti, Allen Ginsberg, Peter Orlovsky, Gary Snyder, Gregory Corso, and Robert Creeley, in addition to people who would become notable in other fields, such as radical feminist Andrea Dworkin,

Dorfman co-starred in the documentary No Hair Day (1999). from which she created large prints. She photographed famous writers, poets, and musicians including Bob Dylan and Allen Ginsberg. Due to bankruptcy, the Polaroid Corporation entirely ceased production of its unique instant film products in 2008. Dorfman stocked up with a year's supply of her camera's last available 20 by 24 instant film.

From February 8, 2020–May 30, 2021, the Museum of Fine Arts, Boston exhibited Elsa Dorfman: Me and My Camera. The “exhibition is the first to explore autobiography in the work of Elsa Dorfman (1937–2020), a beloved Cambridge photographer known for her large-format commissioned portraits.”

Her portraits are held in the collections of the San Francisco Museum of Modern Art, the National Portrait Gallery in Washington, D.C., the Harvard Art Museums, the Portland Museum of Art in Maine and others.

Personal life In 1967, Dorfman met Harvey Silverglate, who was representing the defense in a drug trial. Dorfman thought the case could be the subject of a book and talked it over with him, after which Silverglate asked her to take a portrait of him and his brother to give to their mother. They married nearly a decade later in 1976. Together, they had one son, Isaac.

Dorfman died on May 30, 2020, at her home in Cambridge. She was 83 according to her husband and she suffered kidney failure.

Works