Polaroid Photographer Elsa Dorfman, Friend of the Poets, Retires at 78

The New York Times profiles the much-loved Polaroid-portrait photographer Elsa Dorfman, who is retiring from her craft at the age of 78. "The main reason is that the film and chemicals she depends upon have not been mass-produced since 2008, when Polaroid, which had gone into bankruptcy years before, stopped making them. And the stockpile to which she has access is diminishing, despite post-Polaroid efforts by enthusiasts to keep the cameras running." Dorfman has had connections to the poetry world since working as a secretary at Grove Press in the late 1950s, "during the heyday of its obscenity battles and its ascendancy as a haven for Beat poets, who seemed to gravitate toward Ms. Dorfman like a mother soul." More:

It was at Grove that she met Ginsberg, who became a lifelong friend despite the fact that she was almost a teetotaler and he, at the time, a walking pharmacy. Their first encounter was inauspicious. “He went by my desk and asked, ‘Where’s the can?’ And I thought, ‘The can? What can?’ I’d never heard that before,” she recalled, rolling her eyes and chuckling.

Ms. Dorfman found New York a bit overwhelming and went back to Boston, where she taught fifth grade and eventually married (her husband, Harvey Silverglate, a prominent criminal-defense lawyer and civil libertarian, is among her most-photographed subjects, along with their son, Isaac.) But her poetry connections led to something else, when Gary Snyder sent her a camera from Japan in 1967 and she began using it, despite not quite having the temperament she thought a real photographer should have. “Except that I was a starer,” she wrote in “Elsa’s Housebook: A Woman’s Photojournal,” a book of her black-and-white portraits, published in 1974. “I looked at everything and stared at everyone.”

Read more about Elsa Dorfman at the New York Times.

At top: "Robert Creeley Talking to Fanny Howe, 1972," Elsa Dorfman.