Elsa's Housebook: A Woman's Photojournal

Elsa Dorfman is a Cambridge photographer, best known for her large-scale commissioned Polaroid portraits, and her portraits of family and friends. She is widely beloved, largely for her photographic work but also in part for her warm, bohemian personality, and she is especially celebrated in the Boston area. One of Dorfman’s first projects to receive attention was her photobook, “Elsa’s Housebook: A Woman’s Photojournal", issued in 1974. In the volume, the photographer used a photo-diaristic format to document her life, including the friends and family who visited her in her Cambridge home in the late 1960s and early 1970s. The black-and-white photographs, paired with Dorfman’s texts, form an autobiographical record of Dorfman’s approach to photography, feminism, love, family, and friendships. The cover features the bold red and yellow colors found on the Kodak logo and photographs of the poets Robert Creeley and Allen Ginsberg (close friends), as well as the local couple Dorfman hired to deliver her couch.