RIP Elsa Dorfman (1937-2020) – Boston Portrait Photographer
Elsa Dorfman Homepage
(Harvey Silverglate, Elsa Dorfman, Allen Ginsberg, December 21, 1995.)
Eroll Morris (documentary filmmaker on Elsa Dorfman The B-Side)
American portraitist Elsa Dorfman, known for her intimate large-format Polaroids of friends, artists, celebrities, and herself, has died at age eighty-three from kidney failure, the Boston Globe reports.
Harvard Magazin on Elsa Dorfman
Raising awareness
Dorfman suggested elements of healing through her work in a variety of ways. She photographed terminal cancer patients, emphasizing their dignity. In 1995, she collaborated with graphic artist Marc A. Sawyer to illustrate the booklet 40 Ways to Fight the Fight Against AIDS. She photographed people, both with and without AIDS, each engaged in one of forty activities that might help AIDS victims in their daily life. The photographs were exhibited 1995 at the Lotus Development Corporation in Cambridge, in Provincetown and in New York City. The artist donated the costs of producing the photographs for this project.[16]Dorfman co-starred in the documentary No Hair Day (1999) as she’s taking the portraits of three women undergoing treatment for breast cancer
The above image shows two books by Robert Creeley, the one pictured is Elsa’s Housebook which I bought on my first trip to Boston.