Photographer Elsa Dorfman Looks at "The B-Side"

Using large Polaroid film can get pricey. That’s why photographer Elsa Dorfman always made a point of snapping two photos of her sitters with her large-format Polaroid 20-inch-by-24-inch camera. They got to choose one, and she took the remaining “B-Side.” Dorfman’s distinctive former practice and persona inform The B-Side: Elsa Dorfman’s Portrait Photography.

Featured in the 54th New York Film Festival, Errol Morris’s latest documentary carries on his tradition of probing uncommon callings. It’s an uncommon calling, that tradition began with Gates of Heaven, about pet cemeteries, and brought the filmmaker to profile both noted and unsung souls from death row convict Randall Dale Adams to Defense Secretary Robert MacNamera. The subject of The B-Side: Elsa Dorfman’s Portrait Photography is Morris’s close personal friend.

Speaking from her Cambridge, Massachusetts home, the magnetic, insightful 79 year old reflected on her long love affair with portraiture, which well predated her embrace of the 240-pound Polaroid in 1980:

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