“The B-Side: Elsa Dorfman’s Portrait Photography,” June 21, 2018 (2016), DVD (home). When I think of Errol Morris, I think “Thin Blue Line,” “Fog of War,” or “Unknown Known.” I think of “A Brief History of Time” about Stephen Hawking’s work (not my favorite, I must admit). But these are intense pieces that look at major issues in our body politic and culture. Other Morris documentaries look at people with weird careers “Fast, Cheap and Out of Control” or “Tabloid” about Mormonism and a very bizarre “kidnapping.” And then there’s this one. Elsa Dorfman is the master of the 24×20 Polaroid camera even as she moves towards retirement. Morris documents her life’s work in this medium via interviews with her and footage of her relationships with artists like Allan Ginsberg and numerous other poets, artists, activists and everyday folks who came to her for her special portraits. Her photos are amazing in their clarity, but she has no illusion they represent an inner reality of her subject. They are a fraction of a second in time, not a bared soul or existential truth. They display the role of science and technology in art, but they also speak to her effort to bring joy into people’s lives through her work, even as it remains very much a way of making a living. Unlike Morris’s other documentaries, this is a softer, gentle, intimate study in a personal-professional way, most likely because the subject is softer. We come to know little about her lengthy marriage to husband Harvey Silverglate, one of the nation’s foremost libertarian-civil liberties lawyer, except that he’s not one for celebrating birthdays. Neither do we learn anything about her son. She and her portraits are the total focus in this piece. Her struggle to be recognized and legitimated as a photographer took decades. She remained a commercial portrait photographer out of necessity even as she produced remarkable studies of her many friends in the creative arts. There’s much more I’d like to have learned here, but the conversations with Dorfman, her struggle to gain credibility as a photographer, and her connection to the equipment and her photos which, some of which she had not looked at in over 30 years, was worth the journey. I may have missed it, but at no point does she talk about the role outright sexism as a factor in her struggles; in-group artsy elitism, however, receives its due in the lengthy dismissal she was forced to endure. There’s not even a mention of her work on AIDS related or breast cancer projects. It’s not Morris’s best or most intense film, but as someone who takes lots of photos, I found it interesting to think about her work.