I wasn't feeling real well today so I sort of lazed around in an unfocused way until I discovered this site. I had been wandering around in photo.net reading pieces on portraits that Philip Greenspun had written where he mentioned...

Elsa Dorfman, Portrait Photographer

The site is chock full of the amazing work she has done on the 20 x 24 Polaroid. There are only 5 in the world and she has one of them. I spent hours wandering around her site. Many articles and movies by and about Elsa. And those portraits!

The person she has photographed the most is her friend Allen Ginsberg.

It was hard to take a bad photograph of Allen. Nobody did. Maybe it was because Allen was a photographer from way back. He loved to take pictures. Unrestrained, he could snap, snap and take rolls of film. His images of Kerouac, Cassidy, and Bourroughs are the ones we have in our memory of those days. For the last decade or so he always had a camera with him. He went from a Rollei to lighter and lighter and smaller and smaller cameras. And he used whatever was his camera du jour all the time, even at my house in the last month of his life (though no darkroom experiences for him, ever).

Elsa wrote about seeing Allen's possessions on the block.

Watching Allen Ginsberg Being Auctioned Off at Sotheby's

The catalogue came on the morning of Yom Kippur. I had already lit candles for Allen, Bruce Cratsley, my mother and my father. It was a beautiful day. I was going to think about the past year and the coming year alone in the house and in my garden.

What I did is sit on the couch in the living room, the couch we call the Allen couch because Allen slept on the couch and stayed in the living room for many days when he visited his Boston doctors. I curled up with the catalogue that Bill Morgan had spent a year putting together.

I recognized so much of the stuff. In fact, it was the familiarity that threw me off . It was like looking at the catalogue, if there had been one, of my mother's yard sale when she moved from Newton to Cape Cod. Actually, I couldn't bear to go to my mother's yard sale. I couldn't bear to see all the things she had loved with little price tags, selling for a tenth of what she had paid for them. It wasn't the price, it was the selling. It was the letting go.I remembered the chase, the finding, the saving for, the story of each item.

The section on Allen is interesting as are the articles (check out the movies) but in the end it's the portraits done in her simple style (white backdrop, even lighting, and simple poses) that I find mesmerizing.