Photographer Elsa Dorfman, best known for her large-scale Polaroid images, died Saturday in Cambridge at age 83.
Dorfman’s unique art form – giant 20-by-24 inch Polaroids — featured regular people wearing everyday clothing always in in front of a plain white matte background.
Dorfman said when she was young, her mother wondered why she couldn’t get a secretarial job and live at home, like all the other nice Jewish girls. But she had caught the photography bug, she said, and at the beginning of her career sold photos in Harvard Square.
She later turned her focus to portraits.
“I wore glasses from kindergarten. So, self-portraits help me see,” she told WGBH News’ Jared Bowen on Open Studio in 2016. “And I think maybe that’s why I like photography, because it helps me see.”
Over the years, Dorfman has photographed the famous, including Faye Dunaway, Allen Ginsburg, Bob Dylan and Julia Child.
From her studio basement in Harvard’s Central Square, Dorfman also filmed her most frequent subjects — herself, her son Isaac and her husband, famed civil rights attorney Harvey Silverglate.
In 2016, Dorfman was profiled in a documentary by filmmaker Errol Morris titled “The B-Side.” That‘s what Dorfman called the second of two photographs she always took — the one the client did not take home.
