The B-Side (2016)

Elsa Dorfman: Self

Photos 

Quotes 

• Elsa Dorfman : It was so embarrassing not to be anything. I wasn't married, so you had to be called something when people said what are you doing. In those days, it was mortifying not to be married, so I had to have a thing, so what could be better? My camera! I'm a photographer!

• Elsa Dorfman : Being comfortable with the camera on myself affected how I felt in taking pictures of others. I really had in my mind that this was helping me, in some magical way, to take portraits, because people would sense I did it to myself too.

• Elsa Dorfman : It's sort of like a reservoir that's in me that's operating but I'm not thinking about it when I actually have... the camera is in my hands. I'm really guided by unconscious. Sounds kind of mystical. I think I take my best pictures when my head isn't cluttered with other things.

• Elsa Dorfman : The camera is like a fork or a spoon. It's an instrument you eat your soup with. It's not the soup.

• Elsa Dorfman : I decided that New York was too much for me. There was no woman that I met who wasn't an alcoholic, who wasn't promiscuous, who wasn't a druggie and was creative or had an interesting life. Really a defeat for me was that I went back home and lived with my parents and got a degree at BC to teach elementary school.