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Like the pictures taken by his subject, Errol Morris' latest documentary, "The B-Side: Elsa Dorfman's Portrait Photography," boasts a deceptive simplicity — the idea that one points and shoots, and that's all there is to it, when in fact there's much more going on below the surface.
Elsa Dorfman, a photographer working for decades in Cambridge, Mass., says the surface is all she's trying to capture in her work. She's not after anyone's soul in her photos. As she tells Morris in an interview in her studio: "This is what you're giving me, this is what you're gonna get back."
Dorfman talks happily about her early days as a young single Jewish woman who received her first camera, a Hasselblad, from a colleague. She started taking pictures, and found she enjoyed the process. She would hang around Grolier Book Shop in Harvard Square, getting photos of poets like Allen Ginsberg and Lawrence Ferlinghetti.
Dorfman got backstage to photograph Bob Dylan, after Dylan intervened with security guards who wanted to confiscate her camera. Her other claim to fame were unvarnished self-portraits, usually with her shutter-release cable appearing in the shot, running from the camera to her hand.
In 1980, she found the camera that would change her life and her work: a large-format Polaroid that produced instant prints 20 inches wide and 24 inches high. She used such a camera for 35 years, always taking two pictures and letting the client choose which one to take home. Dorfman opens up drawers filled with hundreds of the leftover prints — which she calls "the b-side," like the backup song to a hit single.
She even experimented a bit with Polaroid's 40-by-80 camera, which produced full-body images that were actual size. A highlight of the film is her talking about using the giant camera to photograph Ginsberg, who became a longtime friend, twice: once fully nude and once in the suit, she said, in which the poet was later buried.
Morris forgoes his favorite interviewing gimmick, the two-camera Interrotron set-up that forces the subject to look directly into the camera. (It's served him well, earning him an Oscar for his examination of Robert McNamara in "The Fog of War.") Without the Interrotron, Morris must go into Dorfman's home court, the cozy backyard studio where she has decades worth of work stored. As a result, he gets a more intimate portrait of an unassuming artist whose pictures are far bigger than her ego.
"The B-Side" is also a farewell of sorts, since the story starts with Dorfman deciding to retire from photography — a move hastened by the demise of the Polaroid company and the end of production of large-format film stock. Dorfman, self-effacing and straightforward, doesn't shed tears for the end of her analog-image era. That's a job for the rest of us, who have to live with the boring ubiquity of digital pictures.
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'The B-Side: Elsa Dorfman's Portrait Photography'
Documentarian Errol Morris celebrates an analog photographer's fascinating career, just as it's coming to an end.
Where • Broadway Centre Cinemas.
When • Opens Friday, July 14.
Rating • R for some graphic nude images and brief language.
Running time • 76 minutes.