Word: dorfman
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Dates: during 1970-1979
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Most of us forgot our photobooks long ago, or keep them tucked away in dressers or desks to be periodically perused or updated. Elsa Dorfman chose to publish hers and the result is her first book. Elsa's Housebook, A Woman's Photojournal. The project was developed while Dorfman was a Fellow of the Radcliffe Institute. The Housebook is an album of portraits, in prose and photographs, of Dorfman's friends and family, a community of people whose comings and goings within her house establish the "seasons and rhythms" of her life...
...short chapters titled "The Camera," "Photography and My Head," "Money" and "Flagg Street," and in the descriptions of the friends whose faces and moods are the subjects of her photographs, Dorfman talks about the problems of trying to make a living by indexing books and selling pictures, of the way her camera subtlely intrudes into and alters conversations and relationships of being single and childless and surrounded by married couples with families...
...they were snapshots in a personal diary. They are outlined by black borders and the name of the subject and a date are written, in script underneath. For a book-created by a photographer, the pictures in Elsa's Housebook are surprisingly small and often less revealing of Dorfman and her subjects than the prose that surrounds and often threatens to overwhelm them. Nearly all of the pictures were taken within the last two years in the kitchen or livingroom of Dorfman's modest duplex near Mather House, where she is a photography tutor...
...PROBLEM with Elsa's Housebook is that we approach it as strangers and remain strangers after we have read it; few of the memories and associations that make these pictures meaningful to Dorfman have been realized within the pictures themselves and few of them are memorable as purely formal images. Dorfman's intimacy with her subjects has not yielded the insight we expect. Many of Dorfman's friends are poets and writers and several of her photographs, like those of Allen Ginsberg and Robert Crocley are interesting simply because they show us famous people relaxing and joking and reading...
Before the Exxon grant was awarded. Dorfman said the committee approached many university administrations for possible funding of a trial development project, but none were willing to put up the money. "Rosovsky's getting awfully stingy. I asked him for $5000 and he wouldn't give it to me," Dorfman said...