The B-Side: Elsa Dorfman's Portrait Photography

In The B-Side, Errol Morris takes us into the world of Elsa Dorfman, a photographer and beguiling storyteller in Cambridge, Massachusetts, whose special picture-taking medium, the huge Polaroid portrait, is facing extinction.
After an early career in New York with a magazine that published Beat poets, Dorfman returned to the Boston area and identified herself as a photographer. Talking to Morris in her cluttered studio, where most of The B-Side is filmed, she explains that, as a Jewish girl in her late 20’s who wasn’t married yet, photography was a way for her to avoid talking about being single.
She photographed her poet friends and sold the pictures on Harvard Square. Then she found her specialty, the large-scale Polaroid camera, which enabled her to make life-sized portraits.
Morris first met Dorfman decades ago when he hired her to take a picture of his son. The film’s title, The B-Side, refers to the second images in each of her Polaroid exposures, which tend to include imperfections of light and color that make those pictures unique. Morris and Dorfman remind us that the technology to make art is disappearing as fast as it is emerging, and that art and fame don’t always overlap.
Errol Morris won an Academy Award for Best Documentary for The Fog of War (2004), his documentary about Robert McNamara and the Vietnam War. His other films include The Thin Blue Line, Fast Cheap and Out of Control, Tabloid, and The Unknown Known. He is a regular contributor to the New York Times on photography.