Subtle Intrusions, Reluctantly Portrayed

WHEN I WAS seven, I started a photo album. In it, I put pictures of my friends and relatives and elementary school and underneath the pictures, in white ink, I wrote, "my best friend, Sara; my second best friend, Debbie; my school..." I still occasionally leaf through those pictures because they conjure up memories and associations, but I suspect that if a stranger found my book, he would think it quaint and naive, but little else.

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."

In 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.

The photographs that accompany the text are presented as if 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.

THE 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 the morning paper. But for someone who says, "It isn't an accident, I think, that the body of my work stems from my relationship with these people." Dorfman has little to tell us about the private moods and character of her sitters.

Dorfman became a photographer by accident--when she graduated from Tufts University she wanted to be a writer, a desire that apparently never completely died and is now reflected in the verbal orientation of her book. In the six years following graduation Dorfman held a succession of frustrating jobs--she arranged poetry readings for the young poets Grove Press published, taught fifth grade and developed teaching material for elementary school science teachers until at the age of 28, a friend put a camera in her hand and showed her how to use it. That was ten years ago and Dorfman has been taking pictures ever since. She writes in her book, My camera shapes my life and the way I approach it," and it is obvious that through photography she has found a sense of purpose and identity that had eluded her in all her previous pursuits. Nonetheless, the impression of Dorfman one is finally left with is of a woman who is still insecure and unsure of herself, who came to her craft late and had to struggle to master it psychologically and technically.

Dorfman is reluctant to probe behind the comfortable surface and reveal the character of her sitters. We are too aware of how much she cares for and depends on these people. Her vulnerability is too obvious and it prevents her from achieving any kind of emotional distance from her subjects. She pinpoints the problem of many of her photographs herself, in a comparison she draws between herself and Diane Arbus:

There are times when I put aside the camera. Forgo the image...Charlie Olchowski once told me Diane Arbus would do anything for a photograph--absolutely anything, go anywhere, to get what she wanted...Since by now I know I have limits and see what pictures I miss because of them. I can understand how that willingness to go forward, that final act to do it, get it, take it, is fundamental to her genius. It separates her from the rest of us.

THE SNAPSHOT approach to photography here yields relaxed, unpretentious pictures but fails to produce photographs that have anything like the authority of complete statements. Dorfman is able at times to make a virtue of her lack of technical bravado and create images that are fresh and spontaneous but too often the pictures lack variety and psychological focus. We see everyone as if we were sitting across the table from them--they sit in some vague middle distance, not close enough for us to scrutinize them, not far enough away for us to see them as figures in an environment. And Dorfman has further limited the clues we have to their personalities by photographing them in her home, rather than in a setting that reflects their tastes and lifestyles.

The pictures that are most effective are those that come closest to being traditional portraits. In the photographs of Gordon Carnie, the late owner of the Grolier Book Shop, on his birthday; writer Eila Kokkinen; and Andrew Wylie '70, something essential and characteristic has been extracted and made permanent in a satisfying formal statement. The figures are posed and fill the entire frame--conscious of being photographed, yet at ease with the photographer.

Diane Arbus subjected her "freaks" to a glaring white light that revealed every pore and blemish. Her photographs are often cruel but not easily forgotten. Her approach is obviously not the only valid one--sympathy and affection are just as legitimate responses for the photographer to have to his subject as clinical detachment. But Dorfman fails to use her emotional response as a means to create a compelling image and in doing so, fails to fulfill one of the photographer's essential responsibilities.