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Elsa Dorfman: This is Harvey, my husband.

He likes to go to the local variety store at night...

to buy essentials, like,

our 50th box of tea or something.

I always worry that he's gonna get hit by a car.

I nagged him until he got--

Not exactly a bib,

it's sort of like to ride a bicycle.

But instead of just putting it on over your coat,

we had our friend sew it very stylishly

on the front and back and it's part of the coat.

He wears it with great flair.

And this coat knew

that it was going to be photographed from the back.

It has all these buttonholes.

If anything, the back is even greater

than the front.

The yellow is from when you scoop up the chemicals.

If there's a residue of chemistry,

then over time, it turns yellow.

(phone rings)

-(phone continues ringing) -Shall I answer the phone?

-Interviewer: Sure. -Okay.

(phone continues ringing)

Elsa: Hello?

Hi, oh, it's Gail.

Everybody it's Gail, we're filming.

Yeah, we're on film right now.

Like the '60s when we used to tape our conversations.

(laughing) And it would be great and brilliant.

All right, sweetie, bye. Bye.

Reporter 1: Polaroid, as we once knew it,

is fading away. They stopped making cameras.

Now the company's announced

they're no longer gonna make that instant film.

Reporter 2: So far, though, Polaroid has not struck a deal

to let another company make the film

to keep those cameras alive and swinging.

Reporter 3: After more than 30 years

in the photography business, a world-renowned pioneer

of large format Polaroid photography,

Elsa Dorfman, is retiring.

Interviewer: So let's look at another picture, if we could.

Elsa: Okay. I'm gonna show you first black and whites.

I wasn't born as a color photographer.

I was a black and white photographer

for about 15 years.

I'm looking here at a picture of Ferlinghetti

and Gordon Cairnie,

and it's on photographic paper, typical of me,

that hasn't been properly washed,

and I'm gonna show you the back because it's staining.

And it will contaminate everything

in this nice gray box.

Here in the corner of this picture

is an issue of The Antioch Review...

which had a series of my photographs

and poems by people.

And I think it was for Gordon's birthday.

The Grolier was like a beacon of sanity.

So many people were there,

all day long,

and everybody knew everybody else.

There I was sitting on a couch.

What was easier than taking pictures?

I met all these people in 1959

when I went from graduating from Tufts

to getting a job in New York as a secretary.

And in those days,

it was unheard of for a nice Jewish girl

not to live with her parents until she was married.

And one place that I was interviewed

was Grove Press.

And I was hired.

Grove published the Evergreen Review.

It was the time of the Lady Chatterley's

Lover case.

Grove was right in the middle of the Village.

Writers would come to use the Apeco machine.

And in those days, the girls, like me,

were in charge of the Apeco machine,

which was the forerunner of Xerox.

Ginsberg would come with like,

a 50-page manuscript or a letter to Burroughs.

Ginsberg never did anything without making a copy.

And one day he said to me, "Where's the can?"

And I said, "The can?"

I had never heard of the word "can"

for a bathroom.

I was like, "What?"

And we were friends from that day

for the next 50 years, I guess.

Man: Mr. Allen Ginsberg is, according to The New York Times,

quote, "Perhaps the most famous

and admired contemporary American poet."

But he's known here in America less as a poet than a prophet.

Allen Ginsberg: America, I've given you all

and now I'm nothing.

America $2.27 January 17, 1956.

I can't stand my own mind.

America, when will we end the human war?

Go fuck yourself with your atom bomb

I don't feel good don't bother me.

I won't write my poem till I'm in my right mind.

America, when will you be angelic?

When will you take off your clothes?

When will you look at yourself through the grave?

When will you be worthy of your million Trotskyites?

America, why are your libraries full of tears?

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 I came home,

lived with my parents, and went to BC

and got a degree for teaching elementary school.

And I got a job teaching in Concord, Massachusetts,

which was like a white, wealthy suburb even back then.

And one of the parents of a kid in my class

called me aside and said, "You don't really belong here"

and sent me to the elementary science program

that was set up by MIT people.

They took pictures of all the teachers teaching,

and so I had a photographer assigned to me.

And that photographer gave me a camera,

didn't say to me,

"Oh, I'm loaning you this Hasselblad.

It's a really good camera, or it cost blah, blah, blah."

Just, "Here, use this camera.

It's called a Hasselblad."

There was a darkroom there that they let me use.

Berenice Abbott had set up that darkroom

and made her "Science" photographs

that are so famous in that darkroom.

He said to me,

"You could be like Berenice Abbott."

Nobody had ever said to me anything except,

"You could be a jerk."

I mean, they didn't say that at Grove but--

that was where I picked up a camera, was at ESI.

It was as incredible in its way as Grove was.

I was just one lucky little Jewish girl...

who escaped by the skin of her teeth.

That's what I think.

Elsa: Almost from the very beginning,

I took self-portraits.

Being comfortable with the camera on myself

affected how I felt

in taking pictures of other people.

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.

Host: I have a very special guest

this evening. She is Elsa Dorfman.

Elsa is a photographer

who lives and works in Cambridge, Massachusetts.

She is the author of Elsa's Housebook:

A Woman's Photojournal.

I think one of the amazing things about you

is that you never picked up a camera

until you were 28 years old.

It was so embarrassing not to be anything.

I wasn't married,

so you had to be called something.

You know, when people said, "What are you doing?"

In those days it was mortifying not to be--

Not to be married. I mean...

So I had to have a thing. So, what could be better?

My camera! I'm a photographer.

I'm always thinking about my work

and how I want to pull my work together

and what I want it to be and the form I want it to take.

And I do that all the time,

when I'm sitting around or talking

or in the morning, cleaning up and stuff.

But when the minute comes to taking the picture,

I'm not thinking about that at all.

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 in my hand.

I'm really guided by my unconscious.

Sounds sort of mystical, but...

I think I take my best pictures

when my head isn't cluttered with other things.

Elsa, do you think the camera tells the truth?

Absolutely not.

You take 20 pictures in two minutes,

and they're so different.

Um... I think it's just--

It's, I mean, that's what I love about it,

it's not real at all.

Here is the couch.

I bought this couch for $300

at a place near the Mount Auburn Cemetery.

And I hired from the Phoenix for ten dollars

some people to pick it up and bring it to Flagg Street.

And they were on the cover of the Housebook.

(laughing)

Interviewer: Tell me about the cord in the picture.

Elsa: It's the cable release.

It's sort of an act of God,

because the cable release is in the perfect place,

and I had no idea

it would be in the perfect place,

and it fell in the perfect place.

And it's amazing, it's like a gift.

And the dress is my favorite Marimekko.

The shopping cart is very relevant in the distance

because this is the shopping cart

that I sold my pictures on the street for two dollars.

And they let me borrow it.

I didn't have to, you know, pilfer it.

They let me borrow it from the store.

Every year I would return it,

and every year I would borrow it.

And I sold these pictures,

along with other pictures, in Harvard Square.

The police would come and want to chase me away.

And I had a letter that Harvey had composed

saying I was protected by the First Amendment,

and I alerted the chief of police,

and they let me stay there.

And the funniest thing is that a couple of those pictures

are owned by the Museum of Fine Arts.

But it was weird because later

I'd run into people and they'd say,

"Oh, I rented an apartment

and a picture of yours was in the bathroom.

Somebody left it there."

They knew how to make me feel good.

Really.

This one of Harvey...

and Harvey was on the phone

with his really close friend who was in Europe,

Norman Zalkind, who he practices law with.

And I was probably going,

(fingers tapping)

"Harvey, you've been on the phone a long time

and it's expensive." (laughing)

This is my mother.

"Elsa."

And it's my favorite picture of my mother.

I didn't realize it at the time, but it is so my mother.

Bringing food,

and my father being in the background,

but there.

I'm sure she also brought a bag of bargains

because she was a total bargain-obsessed person.

Anything under ten dollars that should be 15, she bought.

Oh, here's a picture of--

This is kind of nice of Flagg Street.

This tree, of course, isn't there anymore.

I lived at 19 Flagg Street.

I had this great little duplex house.

It was a great place with a little backyard.

Harvey moved to Flagg Street two houses away,

and we had the two apartments.

And the light was such,

it was perfect for taking pictures

in the middle of the night.

Like a photo set.

I didn't have a fancy lens

that let you take pictures in the dark.

One of the things that's fun

about going through a box like this...

is that question, how things turn out.

And one thing, when I look at these pictures

of the Housebook,

I can't help but feel about how many people are dead

and how many people struggled.

You can predict, predict, and predict,

but life is still unpredictable.

It certainly does something to me

when I go through a box,

or I go through a lot of prints of the Housebook.

I'm amazed how young we were,

how many of us aren't still here.

(soft music playing)

I think one thing about having all the pictures,

you sort of search for like, the narrative.

But there probably is no narrative.

It's just sort of what happened.

It doesn't go by a script.

That's what I've decided.

(music playing)

Elsa: Dylan did something

called the Rolling ThundermRevue.

Before you went into the auditorium,

they confiscated you not for guns,

but for cameras.

So I didn't have my camera,

and Allen told Bob,

"Oh, this is Elsa Dorfman, and she's a good photographer."

And Bob said, "Well, where's your camera?"

And I said, "They took it away from me."

And he said, "Go tell them I said you could get it."

So I had to go running to the car,

get the camera, pass these guys,

"I have permission, I have permission."

(laughs)

And this is in between sets.

It's like quote "the green room,"

it was a teacher's room.

Somebody had been signed up to document the tour,

and once they realized I knew how to focus a camera,

they said, "Get her off the set.

Get her off the set."

And poor Bob, he couldn't do anything.

This is on beautiful rag paper.

This was a 35mm negative.

And I've had this in postcard form.

Sounds very, like,

ungracious to say, "Oh, I love that,"

but once I make them and I see them like this,

I'm very separated from them in a way.

Can't really say about your child,

"Yeah, I know he's adorable.

You know, he's really fabulous."

But I can say that about my work.

I mean, I feel proud and incredulous,

but I don't feel falsely modest.

But I don't feel bragging, either.

I feel, "Yeah, that's really great.

"That's shitty, but this is great," you know?

There's a separation,

like it's gone off to college,

and there it is getting its degree.

(laughs)

We're still a long way

from the realization of the concept

of a camera that would be, oh, like the telephone,

something that you use all day long.

Whenever an occasion arises

in which you want to make sure

that you cannot trust your memory.

I look forward to the time a few years from now...

when you come here

to share with us the excitement and deep satisfaction

of seeing all this in operation

and at the same time

starting to use our ultimate camera

that is a part of the evolving human being.

Elsa: The 20 by 24

took Cambridge by blitz.

Polaroid had an Artist Support Program.

There were like ten people that were invited.

I wasn't on that list,

but of course I went and I saw it.

I was already interested in large format.

Carpenter Center got something called the Itek machine.

You put in a 35 millimeter negative,

and low and behold,

you got a big print.

So, I mean, the image will be familiar,

but here it is in the Itek machine form.

So already my mind was thinking big, okay?

So I'm just gonna show you these because I'm interested myself,

I haven't looked at these in like 30 years.

And so here's another fragment.

It was very fragile paper and it would come out

and you'd have to put it in stop and fixer.

But this much came out

like as if it were a Xerox copier.

Here's a Harvard graduation.

This is so typical of the times.

Here's a guy with his Ph.D.,

and his wife is cradling an infant.

But this is kind of great.

But unlike the 20 by 24,

where you look at a 20 by 24 picture

and you know that the impetus

and the expression of the picture

partly exist because of the camera,

these are taken by a 35mm and blown up,

and they don't have any of the juice

of a different camera or a different format

or a different relationship with the photographer.

The whole scale and everything

comes from the process after the picture is taken.

Whereas in the 20 by 24,

the picture and the process are the same.

But I think that holding up a big picture

led to my comfort with the 20 by 24.

So I think it was an important--

That if you were making some sort of arty or academic,

this led to this led to this--

You could say that playing with the Itek machine

led to my comfort with the 20 by 24.

And my compulsion with it.

Okay. Now look right at the lens,

don't look at me, even though it's very tempting.

Look right at the lens.

Man: Elsa is one of several photographers in the country

who regularly rents this rare 20 by 24 camera,

one of only five in the world,

located at the School of the Museum

of Fine Arts, Boston.

Elsa: I love the 20 by 24.

There's something really marvelous

about the scale and the clarity that makes it heroic.

My style of photography is very literary...

Woman: Oh, God. Oh, God.

Oh, great, oh, good.

Elsa: Influenced by Allen Ginsberg's poetry

in the acceptance of detail and everydayness--

what you're wearing is okay and who you are is okay

and you don't have to be cosmeticized.

And so I've always taken pictures of my family

and the people that I know,

and I have lots of pictures of my son and my husband.

You know, I just was looking for medium,

and I just found it.

This was the first time I used the 20 by 24.

I made a deal with Polaroid

that I would take Allen's picture

and they could keep the two best.

So I have to tell you

that the two best are owned by Polaroid,

but not really by Polaroid

because now they've been dispersed

and I don't know who owns them.

This is 1980.

Harvey had bought me an amaryllis.

We grabbed the amaryllis, Allen and I.

I'm gonna hold it up like this

because my shirt matches the amaryllis.

Ta-da!

You've got to understand that Allen Ginsberg

really understood a camera.

He could disarm himself,

so he wasn't guarded.

This is from '82.

Look at the focus on the beard.

There'll never be film like this again

ever, ever, ever.

Interviewer: Oh, wow, I've never even seen this, Elsa.

Elsa: No, how could you have seen it?

I haven't seen it in 20 years.

It's so funny, isn't it?

Now I know that this is one that Polaroid had.

I think I made two of these and Polaroid kept one.

Now I'm gonna show you something

about how fragile this is.

I don't know whether you can take a picture of it,

but in the back here, there's a crack.

I don't know whether you care, but right here.

Even though this is very good paper,

and this is early paper,

it's really fragile.

Ah! Here's Jonathan.

This is one of the very first pictures I did,

and Jonathan came down from Maine...

where he was living and I took this picture.

So let's see what I wrote on it.

You can see that this is

before I made the pictures longer.

This is where the pod broke open

and I cut, trimmed the paper right there.

Later, as I got used to taking the pictures,

I made them longer.

So this says "Jonathan Richman in from Unity, Maine in 1981."

Man: All right, now we're going to turn

-to the two of them. -(laughing)

Let's wave to the future.

(soft music playing)

Elsa: I have everything in these flat files.

Let's see, this is in 1981,

and there's my mother.

Now I'm older than my mother in this picture.

My father, and Isaac, and me.

And some Legos, Isaac was a big Lego freak.

And this is one of the few times that I had red background.

Interviewer: And the red background was?

Just there.

Because it's a big deal to change the seamless.

It's interesting to me

because I look at my mother and father, and I wonder...

so who am I like and where did I get what?

And now to see them looking young,

they never looked young, but now they look young.

This one, let me just see what this is,

it looks really sad.

This is a camera error.

My clothes aren't really looking like that.

It's something in the film called mottle,

M-O-T-T-L-E,

and it has to do with the rollers.

It's like the camera knew what I was going through.

"My mother called four times today.

She doesn't know who I am or where I live or what I do.

She doesn't remember Harvey or Isaac.

I asked her if she wanted to die.

'Elsa, sometimes you're ridiculous.'"

My mother was always telling me I was ridiculous.

"Elsa, you're ridiculous."

And so one of her last cogent things

was telling me I was ridiculous.

And it's true,

I would stand at that telephone over there.

It would be my mother like ten times,

and it was the most awful,

awful, awful experience,

was my mother dying, my mother and my father both.

Oh, here I am,

here I am, here I am.

Here I am with a picture of my mother and father

holding their wedding picture.

And it says, "My father died last night.

My mother said goodbye Dorfie.

September 24, 1997."

It was just awful.

My father tried to escape from the nursing home.

He got as far as the bus stop,

he had the sense to wait for a bus,

and they sent his favorite nurse out

to talk him into coming back into the building.

I thought it was a sign

of my father's well being that he could--

That he wanted to escape, and he could carry it off.

But I was the only one.

It was awful.

(soft music playing)

Elsa: What I really feel like doing in this darkroom

is having like a darkroom museum.

Everything has a story in this darkroom.

This--

I was gonna say, I don't want to open it

and expose any film that's in here.

(laughs)

Oh, here's film that's probably dead--

Ilford, Ilford film.

Oh, this is a little panoramic camera.

What I thought it was is a dollar camera.

A dollar camera was a very big hit in the '60s,

and it was a great way of showing people

how to take pictures.

I bet they don't even sell these anymore.

I can see that the darkroom was a repository

for what I didn't want to throw away.

Here's actually something essential.

This is a light bar

you would put on a Polaroid camera

to light a picture.

And then they stopped making them,

it was a disaster.

"For Polaroid's SX-70 film cameras."

Don't you remember the first time you saw it?

It is magical.

And after a lifetime in the darkroom,

it seems more magical.

When I was on the 20 by 24,

I was like...

the most excited person in the world.

I had never dreamt that the next 30 years,

that's what I would be doing.

I wanted to keep on taking pictures

on the 20 by 24.

And you had to be in this inner circle.

It was really hard to break the line of their pets...

really. Because I was never a pet.

And I just hung in there.

I always was charged for every roll of film,

I never got a free box of film,

I never got a free SX-70, I never got anything.

But anyhow, I can't complain

because I ended up with the camera.

But that was from being a nag.

(laughs)

I kept saying, "Well, I want to rent a camera,

I want to buy a camera, I want to make a camera."

And I got to be friendly

with different people at Polaroid,

and I found out that there was a camera

that was coming back from Japan.

That put a hole in their theory that there was no camera.

So they said,

"Well, you have to find a decent place to put it."

And it so happened

that Harvey had a relationship with Harold Brown.

And Harold Brown bought a building,

955 Mass. Ave.,

which was two blocks from our house.

Polaroid said,

"Okay, if you're gonna be in this building,

I'll rent you the camera."

Elsa: I can't really explain it too much,

but portraits have always been what's interesting to me.

And I try to make people feel comfortable

so that they'll give a lot of themselves.

But I'm not-- Don't want to invade them

to get more than they're willing to give.

And I like to say to people,

"You're responsible

for how you look in front of my camera.

You can't come in front of my camera

and expect me to do it all."

I mean, I've had like adolescents say,

"Well, this is what you're gonna get."

And you know, I sort of said like, "Fuck you.

You know, this is what you're giving me,

this is what you're gonna get back.

This is no airbrush studio,

this is what you're gonna get!"

I'm really interested in the surfaces of people.

I am totally not interested in capturing their souls.

I'm only interested in how they seem.

That's how I feel about my portraits

and how, for me, portraiture works.

Interviewer: When did you come up with this idea,

how you would sell these?

Elsa: It wasn't a thought-out plan at all.

I had to pay the rent for Mass. Ave.,

I had to pay the rent on the camera,

and I had to pay for the film.

So I had to charge money,

so I always tried to charge

as much as I reasonably thought I could earn.

First place, it was impossible

to get into a gallery.

I didn't have the work

and I didn't have the personality

to interest any Boston dealer in representing me.

There was one who did represent me

and gave me a show,

but it wasn't for me.

And I probably did

as well as I could have done with a gallery.

(sighs) I don't know the answer.

I did what felt like an extension of myself,

like, "Oh, this is something Elsa would do,"

you know what I mean?

As opposed to doing something

that I felt, "What is Elsa doing?"

Everything I did made sense if you knew me.

Or if you knew me and Harvey.

This was my 50th birthday.

Harvey bought me these black balloons.

He was walking near his office,

and he saw a guy in a tuxedo delivering black balloons.

And he got the idea,

"That's what I'll give her, black balloons."

Isaac comes home from school and the doorbell rings,

and it's a guy delivering black balloons.

And so I said,

"We've got to take a picture with this."

I took one shot and this was it.

I think for the next 11 years,

Harvey gave me black balloons on my birthday.

And it wouldn't be so funny

except that Harvey was not a "Happy Birthday" person.

When I turned 75,

he went the whole day before saying to me,

"Happy Birthday."

You know, you want to murder the guy.

He was not one for Valentine's Day

or anything like that.

This is another one of the birthday ones.

So that one was my 51st birthday in '88.

So this is 54, a few years later.

Isaac has really changed in this one.

And we looked so funny padding around the house

in our warm red nightgowns.

I said, "Oh, we have to go over to the studio."

And this shows how game Harvey could be,

for all his, "Your birthday,"

he did stop what he was doing and take a picture,

go over, change his clothes, and pose in front of the camera.

(soft music playing)

Elsa: My work is about affection.

People come to me

and they want the picture taken either out of affection

for the person they're giving the photograph to,

or affection for the person they're gonna be with.

It's very family-oriented.

When I first started, the very first time

I showed my Polaroids was at MIT,

and they matted them and got rid of the borders.

And I had to complain

and say, "No, no, no, I have to have the borders."

And they said, "All right, all right,"

you know, "this woman is a pain in the ass.

All right, all right."

And they did it.

These marks right here

are like the tire marks on the side

as the roller is going through the camera.

So those actually mean something.

You can actually tell which camera

is being used by the tire marks.

And my tires have never been changed.

Elsa: The camera is like a fork or a spoon.

It's an instrument that you eat your soup with.

It's not the soup.

So it depends upon who's holding the camera

and who's doing the photograph.

I think a lot of my work, people have said,

"Oh, her work is too sunny."

The explanation is, in my life I've worked hard not to be down.

Life when you're down is hard enough,

you don't need to walk around with a picture of it.

I'm not good at...

"Oh yeah, it's really bad."

"Your mother is a witch, your husband is awful."

"The food is lousy. Yeah, you're right.

You should hear my story."

I'm not that kind of person.

I don't like to take pictures of people who are sad.

And I don't like to take pictures

of people who are broken-hearted.

I somehow have this misguided therapeutic idea

that it's my role in the universe

to make people feel better.

"This'll be easy. Look, it's easy.

Let's have fun."

So I do whip up a certain energy.

Interviewer: So you've taken thousands of these?

Don't forget, a lot of these are mistakes.

But because they're 20 by 24s,

they're too expensive to throw away.

Interviewer: A lot of these are mistakes?

Yeah, because when I have a client, I take two.

And the client chooses one and the other one is a reject.

This is the one that the family didn't take.

I call the B-side.

You know how in music there's an A-side and a B-side?

I can see by looking at this one,

which has so much charm to it,

this is probably better than the one they did take.

Here's another one.

And so this is sort of a good panorama

of what people were wearing for sneakers 13 years ago.

Very often, they have blinks

and it's really the unusual family

that will take one with a kid blinking.

But this is not a bad blink.

He's really cute.

Just let me see again, hold on.

Red-haired and blue-eyed

or certainly green-eyed people blink in the lights.

Yeah, they really do.

Like here's one that's really cute and it--

And the people, probably, didn't like the mother.

But I think it's adorable.

Now, they look perfectly wonderful.

I don't see anything wrong with this one.

Why didn't the family want it?

Oh, now here's one.

Look at this.

God knows what caused this.

This is from the camera.

The color is from a problem with the film but I love it.

Interviewer: The other part of this process

that fascinates me is the element of perishability.

Right.

Interviewer: Fugitive color, fugitive images.

I try to deny it.

I would say in the last year,

I've had an awakening

because...

...I don't think I had any idea how fugitive they really were.

So the warning I gave my clients was,

"Keep your portrait out of the direct sun.

Polish your frame rarely and when you do,

use Plexiglas cleaner and a soft cloth.

Never, ever use Windex and paper towel.

Enjoy."

Isaac and Harvey had been hanging on the wall

since we moved into this house.

(soft music playing)

The 40 by 80s represent a Polaroid

that completely disappeared.

There's never going to be a 40 by 80 Polaroid again, ever.

Color Services, they're gonna copy the 40 by 80s

and then tell me whether I should put them

back in frames or how I should store them.

I knew from the Polaroid grape vine

that they were working with a 40 by 80.

The Polaroid grape vine is where you found out everything.

"Oh, yeah, I can't do this

because tomorrow I'm working at the museum on the 40 by 80."

Or, "Can you imagine the film isn't ready?"

More grousing.

"Can you imagine?

Can't count on those people down in packaging."

Oh, you know.

The camera was like a room with a hole for a lens.

You were outside and there was a pedestal

and you're standing like at this height.

The rollers for the lens

had to be as big as this, this is 1:1.

And any little sneeze then,

where you went slower,

would be a different color than if you picked up your pace.

And if you're not even, you can really see it.

Interviewer: The idea of writing these captions,

where did that come from?

Elsa: I kind of liked the idea

because then you know when you took it.

I mean, it's so instinctive and intuitive.

So I did it, then Allen,

when he started to take pictures,

he wrote under his pictures.

He actually, in an interview,

says that he got the idea from me.

I mean, it's not a very big idea.

Interviewer: Well, tell me about the circumstances

of this photograph.

Elsa: Allen was coming to town

and I got Polaroid to let me use the 40 by 80.

First, we did the dressed one

and I think Allen's wearing his suit

that he actually got buried in.

Then once we hung up that dressed one,

it sort of was like a normal response.

"Oh, why don't we take-- Put that behind a naked one?"

It wasn't like an act of genius.

It was just like,

"Well, we have the ice cream and we have the cones.

Why don't we put the ice cream on top of the cone?"

I mean, like...

There were no test shots and no rehearsal.

It's really a miracle when you think that this one--

there's another one behind it, you know what I mean?

He loved to have his picture taken naked.

Interviewer: So it most certainly was not you

that insisted on the nudity?

No. I was a good Jewish girl. No, no, no.

I would never, I don't think I--

No, because to this day,

I'll always remember the first time

Allen opened up the door naked.

"What?" (laughs)

He loved the camera anyhow.

He was an omnivore.

Interviewer: Does it bring Allen back,

looking at these photographs?

Oh, of course, it does.

Maybe that's when photographs have their ultimate meaning,

is when the person dies.

Answering Machine: Monday, 4:33 p.m., line one.

Ginsberg: Hi, Elsa, this is Allen Ginsberg.

Um... I'm in Beth Israel Hospital.

Some serious news.

212-420-3301.

And I'll be here until Wednesday to go home.

Um... I have something more serious,

so... as soon as you can reach me, best.

Thank you and best regards to Harvey.

And I have a call

and I'm waiting to hear from Dr. Lau.

Okey-doke. See you.

Answering Machine: Friday, 3:05 p.m., line one.

Man: Listen, Elsa, Allen came home from the hospital on Wednesday

and was feeling good, hospice situation,

you know, about the cancer.

But he had a stroke last night, Thursday night,

and he's in a final coma now.

So just put your thoughts to Allen.

He's in a picture of repose,

surrounded by people who love him

and good medical care.

But we're not doing anything intrusive.

We're letting him go. Okay? Thank you.

Wow.

Elsa: I owe Allen a big debt.

It would be too corny to say the debt of life,

but the debt of a friend.

If you're a kind of a

"Oh, this will be the same forever" person...

Or if you're a photographer

and you're always nailing down what's the now...

...when you realize it doesn't matter

how much you try to nail down the now,

the now is racing beyond you.

All of a sudden, you have these cameras that--

They're artifacts like ashtrays.

Interviewer: When did you know that this film

was just no longer going to be available?

Because everybody was talking about it every day.

It was sort of like-- As if it were a bakery,

"How's the butter today?"

"Oh, the cows are making it purple."

Polaroid was very intimate,

so everybody knew everything and everybody cared.

So the word spread.

The company went bankrupt and idiots bought it.

The people who bought it were only interested

in the brand name.

They weren't going to save anything.

They threw away the most wonderful things.

They had no respect for great machinery.

It's hard for me to feel angered

when I had the camera all this time,

and when I owe my life to the Polaroid.

So many people who worked for Polaroid were so nice to me.

But I'm certainly angry at the people who...

...made all the stupid decisions.

So when Polaroid was gonna destroy

all the remaining film,

I realized something had to happen.

And that was how Dan Stern was such a lifesaver

in putting up the money for saving the leftover film.

I don't want to give up the studio

and I wanna be able to take pictures of myself

and my friends and not worry if there are lines

or money or anything.

I just thought like, enough.

So that was when I knew.

Interviewer: What is going to happen

to this archive?

Elsa: I don't have a clue.

I don't have a clue.

Maybe the best will be sold

and then another decade will go by

and the pretty-goods will be sold,

and then somebody will say, "Oh, there are the rejects."

They'll be sold.

If I were lucky, that would be what would happen.

But... But I have no idea.

You know, Boston is full of photographers

who worry about that

and nobody has any solution.

Some people are very--

You know, have made arrangements

with like Yale

or, you know, somebody to take their work

or take it with an endowment, or who the hell knows.

I don't have the stamina for that,

you know what I mean? I couldn't do that.

So when people get together,

they used to talk about

where their kid would go to college

and would their kid get into nursery school

and what nursery school and...

But now they talk about

where their archive is going to go.

It's awful.

(laughs)

(soft music playing)

What amazes me

is that you just have to wait long enough

because my work was so rejected

and so put down,

it adds to the pleasure of people liking it now.

For so long, I was at the bottom of the list.

Even at Polaroid, I was at the bottom of the list.

Really, way at the bottom.

But somehow, I just kept plowing along.

So maybe at some point, somebody'll say,

"Oh, those white file drawers,

they wouldn't be so bad to have here."

But I don't know.

And I was lucky in the way to find a camera and to like it.

It's a real way of being a quote "artist"

and having an off-beat life...

...inventing sort of a way of living that's comfortable.

It worked.

I feel very grateful that it-- That it worked.