|
The First Art Newspaper on the Net |
|
Established in 1996 |
|
Saturday, November 2, 2024 |
|
Elsa Dorfman, who made art with giant Polaroids, dies at 83 |
|
|
Postcards of photos taken by Elsa Dorfman, a photographer who uses a 20-by-24-inch Polaroid camera, one of only five originally made by the company, in her studio in Cambridge, Mass., Dec. 22, 2015. Dorfman died on May 30, 2020, in Cambridge, Mass., where she had lived for more than 50 years. She was 83. Her husband, Harvey Silverglate, said the cause was kidney failure. Gretchen Ertl/The New York Times.
by Randy Kennedy
|
NEW YORK (NYT NEWS SERVICE).- In 1980, a little-known Boston photographer named Elsa Dorfman got a chance to use a rare Polaroid camera that weighed 200 pounds and produced prints 2 feet high, a Godzilla of a device that dwarfed her.
It could not have been more different from the small cameras she used to shoot friends and poets like Allen Ginsberg and Anne Waldman. But she was smitten with the Polaroids power to render a paintingsize image so rapidly that she and her subject could watch the likeness materialize together before their eyes. I was in love, she said.
Polaroid deployed the cameras as public relations tools, often reserving them for famous photographers. But Dorfman pursued the company so relentlessly (I nagged them and I nagged them) that it finally agreed to let her lease one for herself.
Over the next three decades, she directed her big Polaroid to such profound and meaningful ends that the company probably should have paid her for its use.
Operating from the basement of an office building in Cambridge, Massachusetts, she ran a portrait studio through which flowed generations of newlyweds, new parents, grandparents and extended families, as well as dying cancer patients, circus clowns, coifed poodles, lesbian motorcycle gang members and celebrities like Julia Child and Faye Dunaway.
Dorfman insisted that she didnt consider herself an artist. But her work, which placed her within a lineage of commercial portraitists reaching back almost to photographys birth, added up nonetheless to an extraordinary collective portrait of her time, one whose constituent parts now reside in major museum collections.
Dorfman died May 30 in Cambridge, Massachusetts, where she had lived for more than 50 years. She was 83. Her husband, Harvey Silverglate, said the cause was kidney failure.
Dorfmans intention with the Polaroid, she told filmmaker Errol Morris in his 2016 documentary, The B-Side: Elsa Dorfmans Portrait Photography, was to try to get as close as possible to what she saw and felt, a mission she pursued with a sense of almost tragic humility.
If youre a photographer always nailing down Whats the now? she said in the film, it doesnt matter how much you try. The now is racing beyond you.
In a sense, Dorfman was racing against time almost from the moment she embarked on her Polaroid work. The company entered a precipitous decline in the 1980s, outpaced by photographic technology. Before declaring bankruptcy in 2001, it closed several factories, and in 2008 it ceased mass production of the film and chemicals she needed to make her prints, meaning she had to rely on a stockpile maintained by Polaroid enthusiasts.
Its dwindling, and Im dwindling, she said in an interview with The New York Times in 2016 as she began ramping down her studios operations.
But for as long as it lasted she reveled in the imperiled, defiantly analog nature of her work, which required sheer physical stamina in wrestling the prints from the cameras wooden body.
She ran this camera alone for 30 years, which is kind of insane, said Nafis Azad, former director of photography for the 20x24 Studio, a Manhattan company that acquired Polaroid materials. Typically, two or three people run one of these things.
As unwieldy as the camera could be, Dorfmans concerns about her photographs were more philosophical than technical. She wanted her subjects to be able to present themselves as they saw fit, with her own sensibility kept outside the frame.
The closest she came to an artists statement, pinned to her studio door, said of her subjects, I do not try to probe or illuminate their souls. It added: They embrace their uneven features and the cowlick that wont stay down even the few extra pounds. The Japanese have a word for this pose of total naturalness and total attention sonomama. As my work on this camera has evolved, I have come to realize that my portraits are about affection and survival.
As she told Morris: The camera is like a fork or a spoon. Its an instrument you eat your soup with. Its not the soup.
To criticism that her work was not sufficiently deep or critical, that too many people in her pictures were smiling, she added dismissively that unhappiness was burden enough: You dont need to walk around with a picture of it.
Elsa Susan Dorfman was born April 26, 1937, in Cambridge, the eldest of three daughters of Arthur and Elaine (Kovitz) Dorfman. Her father was a fruit and vegetable buyer for the Stop & Shop grocery chain; her mother was a homemaker. Dorfman grew up in the Roxbury section of Boston and in Newton, Massachusetts.
She studied French literature at Tufts University and, after graduating, moved to New York City, where she worked as a secretary at Grove Press during its heyday as a Beat Generation clubhouse. She befriended poets like Ginsberg, serving as what she called their devoted and decidedly square handmaiden, helping them manage their correspondence and readings schedules.
Poet Gary Snyder sent her a Mamiya camera from Japan in 1967, and she began using it tentatively at first, feeling that she did not possess the temperament of a real photographer. Except that I was a starer, she wrote in Elsas Housebook: A Womans Photojournal, a book of her black-and-white portraits, published in 1974. I looked at everything and stared at everyone.
It was Ginsberg and his partner Peter Orlovsky who were her entree to the Polaroid world. The company agreed to subsidize a photo shoot if the two were her subjects. Ginsberg held an amaryllis and in short order shed his clothes, as did Orlovsky. Dorfman was supposed to take only 10 exposures each was expensive but soon realized that she had taken 30.
No wonder they were aghast, she wrote of the companys officials. The amaryllis we had brought to the studio went from tight shut to full bloom under the studio lights. I was hooked.
In addition to her husband, a prominent civil liberties lawyer and writer, Dorfman is survived by a son, Isaac Dorfman Silverglate; two grandchildren; and her sisters, Sandra Phyllis Dorfman and Jane Steele.
On the occasion of Dorfmans first career retrospective, which opened at the Museum of Fine Arts in Boston in February, a reporter for The Boston Globe recounted one of her favorite quotations, borrowed from André Breton, who regarded it as a riddle. Dorfman, on the other hand, considered it a way of life: Seeing you for the first time, I recognized you without the slightest hesitation.
© 2020 The New York Times Company
|
|
Today's News
June 3, 2020
ARTBnk to Provide Free Fine Art Valuations to Support Nonprofits
Hitler's birthplace to be 'neutralised' with redesign
Holy smoke! Israelites used weed in ancient rituals
Hunt for Red O'Donnell: does Spain chapel house Irish rebel remains?
Christo's billowy visions, fleeting but unforgettable
Hauser & Wirth opens online exhibition 'Annie Leibovitz. Still Life'
Kiasma reopens exhibiting an excellent selection of Finnish paintings from the first decades of the 2000s
Stedelijk Museum store offers limited edition face masks by Carlos Amorales
The sacrosanct endowment? Not anymore for some arts groups
Elsa Dorfman, who made art with giant Polaroids, dies at 83
Tunisia seeks to block online auction of royal artefacts
Creative studio AllRightsReserved curates Sotheby's charity auction
Hindman Auctions announces inaugural Antiquities & Islamic Art auction
A London home goes from Georgian to Modern, with a detour
These times call for Stephen Petronio's coiled energy
How 'Phantom of the Opera' survived the pandemic
Nailya Alexander Gallery opens an online exhibition of works by Angel Albarrán and Anna Cabrera
Missoula Art Park exhibit showcases large sculptures from salvaged materials
Christie's announces online sale 'Face Time: People in Art Through the Ages'
Arc de Triomphe to get posthumous Christo wrap in 2021
Turner Auctions + Appraisals announces a sale of maps, books & illustrations
Summer exhibition 'Textiles from Egypt' opens at the Rijksmuseum van Oudheden in Leiden
Federico Acerri, who answered students' questions, dies at 81
Robb Forman Dew, novelist who wrote of families, dies at 73
Buy Facebook Likes Your Profile Reputation
Custom Canvas Paintings: A Gift Any Architect Will Love!
Why Artists & Graphic Designers are Shifting to Digital
Best place to store garbage cans
Tips for Cleaning Museums
How do I manage my medical bills after a car accident in California?
|
|
|
|
|
Museums, Exhibits, Artists, Milestones, Digital Art, Architecture, Photography, Photographers, Special Photos, Special Reports, Featured Stories, Auctions, Art Fairs, Anecdotes, Art Quiz, Education, Mythology, 3D Images, Last Week, . |
|
|
|
Royalville Communications, Inc produces:
|
|
|
Tell a Friend
Dear User, please complete the form below in order to recommend the Artdaily newsletter to someone you know.
Please complete all fields marked *.
Sending Mail
Sending Successful
|
|