The "The Polaroid Lady" Story

It was an ordinary day.  Looking at the three large manipulated Polaroid prints I have in my den at the corner of our home we call the Beach House.  The prints themselves are 18 inches square, but 16 inches square including the frame.  They now occupy the den, since I had to remove them from the gallery where they were on sale.  The owner decided to downsize and asked if I could remove the prints since they take up too much wall space.  And...she is right.  I had been taking Polaroids for close to 20 years and manipulating the soft emulsion between the two layers to make the photographs look like paintings.  Then, Polaroid discontinued their Polaroid line and I went out of business.  I still have about 100 or so that I can reproduce, but no new ones for many years now.  I recently read about a woman who began taking Polaroids in 1980, but what she did was quite different than what I did.  Her camera weighed 200 pounds and produced prints two feet high.  I would have loved to have had a camera such as that for what I did.  Woman's name was Elsa Dorfman and she lived in Boston, Massachusetts.  

Elsa with her camera in 2007.

The camera was a Godzilla of a device that totally dwarfed her.  The more I read the more I realized that the camera could not have been more different from the small Polaroid that she, and I, used to take photos of friends and scenics.  She used it to take photos of poets like Allen Ginsberg and Anne Waldman.  But, she also loved the power to render a painting-size image so rapidly that she and her subject could watch it appear almost instantly.  Polaroid developed the huge cameras as a public relations tool and tried to make sure famous photographers would have one.  Ms. Dorfman didn't fit into that category, but she relentlessly bugged them until they finally agreed to let her lease one for herself.  

Elsa Dorgman in 2015 at her frame shop in Cambridge, Mass.

Over the next 30 years she gave Polaroid so much exposure they probably should have paid her for what she did for them.  She worked in the basement of an office building in Cambridge, Mass.  Her portraiture studio saw newlyweds, new parents, grandparents and extended families.  She also photographed in large scale dying cancer patients, circus clowns, lesbian motorcycle gang members and a handful of celebrities.  Her portraitures were amazing, both in size and in composition.  Some are now in major museum collections.  Elsa died on May 30 of this year.  She was 83 years old.  Her husband, Harvey Silverglate, said the cause was kidney failure.  In 2016 filmmaker Errol Morris did a documentary on Ms. Dorfman's invention with the Polaroid.  She told him it was to try and get as close as possible to what she saw and felt, a mission she pursued with a sense of almost tragic humility.  The documentary is called "The B-Side: Elsa Dorfman's Portrait Photography."  She said in the documentary, "If you're a photographer always nailing down 'What's the now?' It doesn't matter how much you try.  The now is racing beyond you."  

A Polaroid of Julia Childs in 1992

Polaroid at the time was facing a decline in it's products due to photographic technology.  Eventually in 2008 it ceased mass production of the film and chemicals needed to make prints.  I felt the pinch in my Polaroid photographaphs I took and Ms. Dorfman felt it too.  At first we both relied on the stockpile that Polaroid had on hand, but that eventually disappeared.  But, she never gave up putting the film in the huge camera's body, snapping the photograph and removing it after exposure.  She ran the camera alone for 30 years which was almost impossible since it was made to be operated by at least 2 and sometimes 3 people.  She wanted her subjects to be able to present themselves as they saw fit.  She called it "sonomama", which is the Japanese word for total naturalness.  She said her camera was like a fork or spoon. An instrument to eat your soup with.  Elsa was born on April 26, 1937 in Cambridge, Mass.  Her father was a fruit and vegetable buyer for a grocery chain while her mother was a homemaker.  She studied at Tufts University and eventually moved to New York City where she was a secretary at Grove Press.  She befriended many poets.  Poet Gary Snyder sent her a Mamiya camera from Japan in 1967 and she was hooked.   She said, "I looked at everything and stared at everyone."  Mr. Ginsberg managed to get her the Polaroid camera she wanted.  The deal was that the company would subsidize a photo shoot of Ginsberg and his partner Peter Orlovsky if she would take only 10 exposures.  Before anyone knew it, she had taken 30.  She was hooked.  Her first photographic show was at the Museum of Fine Arts in Boston.  She regarded her photography as a way of life.  "Seeing you for the first time, I recognized you without the slightest hesitation," was Ms. Dorfman's saying.  It was another extraordinary day in the life of an ordinary guy.