Elsa Dorfman
Encyclopedia
Cambridge, Massachusetts
Cambridge is a city in Middlesex County, Massachusetts, United States, in the Greater Boston area. It was named in honor of the University of Cambridge in England, an important center of the Puritan theology embraced by the town's founders. Cambridge is home to two of the world's most prominent...
, Massachusetts
Massachusetts
The Commonwealth of Massachusetts is a state in the New England region of the northeastern United States of America. It is bordered by Rhode Island and Connecticut to the south, New York to the west, and Vermont and New Hampshire to the north; at its east lies the Atlantic Ocean. As of the 2010...
. She is now known for her use of a Polaroid
Instant camera
The instant camera is a type of camera that generates a developed film image. The most popular types to use self-developing film were formerly made by Polaroid Corporation....
20 by 24 inch camera (one of only 6 in existence,) from which she creates large prints. She has photographed famous writers, poets, and musicians including Bob Dylan
Bob Dylan
Bob Dylan is an American singer-songwriter, musician, poet, film director and painter. He has been a major and profoundly influential figure in popular music and culture for five decades. Much of his most celebrated work dates from the 1960s when he was an informal chronicler and a seemingly...
.
Her principal published work, originally published in 1974 and out of print but now available on her web site, is Elsa's Housebook - A Woman's Photojournal, a photographic record of family and friends who visited her at 19 Flagg Street in Cambridge when she lived there during the late 1960s and early 1970s. Many famous people, especially literary figures associated with the Beat generation
Beat generation
The Beat Generation refers to a group of American post-WWII writers who came to prominence in the 1950s, as well as the cultural phenomena that they both documented and inspired...
, were in her circle of acquaintance and as a result are prominent in the book, including Lawrence Ferlinghetti
Lawrence Ferlinghetti
Lawrence Ferlinghetti is an American poet, painter, liberal activist, and the co-founder of City Lights Booksellers & Publishers...
, Allen Ginsberg
Allen Ginsberg
Irwin Allen Ginsberg was an American poet and one of the leading figures of the Beat Generation in the 1950s. He vigorously opposed militarism, materialism and sexual repression...
and Peter Orlovsky
Peter Orlovsky
Peter Anton Orlovsky was an American poet.-Life and work:Orlovsky was born in the Lower East Side of New York City, the son of Katherine and Oleg Orlovsky, a Russian immigrant. He was raised in poverty and was forced to drop out of Newtown High School in his senior year so he could support his...
, Gary Snyder
Gary Snyder
Gary Snyder is an American poet , as well as an essayist, lecturer, and environmental activist . Snyder is a winner of a Pulitzer Prize for Poetry...
, Gregory Corso
Gregory Corso
Gregory Nunzio Corso was an American poet, youngest of the inner circle of Beat Generation writers...
, and Robert Creeley
Robert Creeley
Robert Creeley was an American poet and author of more than sixty books. He is usually associated with the Black Mountain poets, though his verse aesthetic diverged from that school's. He was close with Charles Olson, Robert Duncan, Allen Ginsberg, John Wieners and Ed Dorn. He served as the Samuel P...
, in addition to people who would become notable in other fields, such as radical feminist Andrea Dworkin
Andrea Dworkin
Andrea Rita Dworkin was an American radical feminist and writer best known for her criticism of pornography, which she argued was linked to rape and other forms of violence against women....
and civil rights lawyer and Foundation for Individual Rights in Education
Foundation for Individual Rights in Education
The Foundation for Individual Rights in Education is a non-profit group founded in 1999 and focused on civil liberties in academia in the United States...
co-founder Harvey A. Silverglate (who would become Dorfman's husband). She has also photographed staples of the Boston rock scene such as Jonathan Richman
Jonathan Richman
Jonathan Michael Richman is an American singer, songwriter and guitarist. In 1970 he founded The Modern Lovers, an influential proto-punk band. Since the mid-1970s, Richman has worked either solo or with low-key, generally acoustic backing...
frontman of The Modern Lovers, and Stephen Tyler of Aerosmith.
New York City
New York is the most populous city in the United States and the center of the New York Metropolitan Area, one of the most populous metropolitan areas in the world. New York exerts a significant impact upon global commerce, finance, media, art, fashion, research, technology, education, and...
in 1959 and found a job as a secretary to the editors at Grove Press
Grove Press
Grove Press is an American publishing imprint that was founded in 1951. Imprints include: Black Cat, Evergreen, Venus Library, Zebra. Barney Rosset purchased the company in 1951 and turned it into an alternative book press in the United States. The Atlantic Monthly Press, under the aegis of its...
, a leading Beat publisher. When she later moved home to Cambridge to pursue her master's degree
Master's degree
A master's is an academic degree granted to individuals who have undergone study demonstrating a mastery or high-order overview of a specific field of study or area of professional practice...
, she called herself the "Paterson Society" and began arranging readings for many Beat authors who had become friends, maintaining an active correspondence with them as they traveled the world. By 1962, she was teaching fifth grade
Fifth grade
Fifth grade is a year of education in the United States and many other nations. The fifth grade is the fifth school year after kindergarten. Students are usually 10 – 11 years old, and are preteens...
; poet Paul Blackburn visited her in school one day and read to the children "to the shock of the very straight principal." A year later, in 1963, Dorfman began working for the Educational Development Corporation whose photographer, George Cope
George Cope
George A. Cope is the CEO of BCE/Bell Canada, achieving that position aged 47 as part of the thirty five billion dollar leveraged buyout led by Providence Equity and the Ontario Teachers' Pension Fund in 2008. He led a competitor, Telus Mobility, before becoming President at Bell in 2005. He...
, introduced her to photography in June 1965. She made her first sale two months later, in August 1965, for $25 of a photograph of Charles Olson
Charles Olson
Charles Olson , was a second generation American modernist poet who was a link between earlier figures such as Ezra Pound and William Carlos Williams and the New American poets, which includes the New York School, the Black Mountain School, the Beat poets, and the San Francisco Renaissance...
which was used on the cover of his book The Human Universe. Due to economic limitations, she did not buy her own camera until 1967, when she sent a check for $150 to Philip Whalen
Philip Whalen
Philip Glenn Whalen was an American poet, Zen Buddhist, and a key figure in the San Francisco Renaissance and close to the Beat generation.-Biography:...
who was then in Kyoto, Japan, and he in turn enlisted Gary Snyder
Gary Snyder
Gary Snyder is an American poet , as well as an essayist, lecturer, and environmental activist . Snyder is a winner of a Pulitzer Prize for Poetry...
, who could speak Japanese
Japanese language
is a language spoken by over 130 million people in Japan and in Japanese emigrant communities. It is a member of the Japonic language family, which has a number of proposed relationships with other languages, none of which has gained wide acceptance among historical linguists .Japanese is an...
, to purchase the camera and mail it to her. In May 1968, she moved into the Flagg Street house which would become the basis of her Housebook.