"Elsa Dorfman: Me and My Camera" explores autobiographical works by the Cambridge artist

"Personal Space: Self-Portraits on Paper" challenges notions of traditional self-portraiture

Both exhibitions complement themes explored in "Lucian Freud: The Self-Portraits"

BOSTON (January 8, 2020)—Artists have recorded their likenesses and examined their inner selves through self-portraiture for centuries, documenting changing faces and bodies throughout their lifetimes. In February, the Museum of Fine Arts, Boston (MFA), presents two concurrent exhibitions that explore depictions of the self through photography, prints and drawings. Elsa Dorfman: Me and My Camera, in the Herb Ritts Gallery, is the first exhibition to explore autobiography as a significant theme in the work of the beloved Cambridge photographer Elsa Dorfman (born 1937), who is known primarily for her large-format commissioned Polaroid portraits of family and friends. In the adjacent Clementine Brown Gallery, Personal Space: Self-Portraits on Paper examines the range of creative approaches that contemporary artists have taken to construct and express their identities through self-portraits. Elsa Dorfman: Me and My Camera is supported by Abigail Congdon and Joseph Azrack, and Kathy Metcalfe and Lang Wheeler. Personal Space: Self Portraits on Paper is supported by the Susan G. Kohn and Harry Kohn, Jr. Fund for Contemporary Prints. 

On view from February 8 through June 21, 2020, both exhibitions complement the themes explored in Lucian Freud: The Self-Portraits, the first exhibition to concentrate on the celebrated British painter's self-portraits. Organized by the Royal Academy of Arts, London, in collaboration with the MFA, Lucian Freud: The Self-Portraits will be on view at the Museum from March 1 through May 25, 2020.

Elsa Dorfman: Me and My Camera features approximately 20 photographs from across four decades of the artist's ongoing career, demonstrating the rich autobiographic thread that runs throughout her work. Curated by Anne E. Havinga, the Estrellita and Yousuf Karsh Chair of Photography, and James Leighton, Curatorial Research Associate of Photographs, the exhibition includes 14 of her 20x24 Polaroid self-portraits, made almost every year since 1980. Dorfman began working with the 200-pound camera four years after it was introduced in 1976; her camera is one of the first five produced. The exhibition also includes a selection of early black-and-white photographs from Dorfman’s landmark 1974 photobook Elsa’s Housebook: A Woman’s Photojournal. The book celebrates Elsa’s close circle of friends, including the poet Allen Ginsberg, who regularly visited the photographer’s home throughout the 1960s and 1970s. All of these photographs reveal the disarming informality of Dorfman’s approach, as well as her warm spirit and the joy she takes in her medium. Each Polaroid features a title in her distinctive cursive hand across the bottom of the print. Her story is told not only through text and photographs, but also through the medium of film. A monitor will play clips from the Errol Morris documentary The B-Side: Elsa Dorfman’s Portrait Photography (2017), which features in-depth interviews with the artist.

Though many of her portraits are of others, Dorfman’s self-portraiture is integral to her entire practice. “Being comfortable with the camera on myself affected how I felt in taking pictures of others,” she once said. “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.”

The works on view in Elsa Dorfman: Me and My Camera are primarily drawn from a recent gift of 101 works from the artist's extensive archive. The gift includes 19 large-format Polaroid photographs and 82 black-and-white gelatin silver prints from Elsa's Housebook. These works join 15 other photographs by the artist already in the MFA’s collection—making the Museum’s holdings a comprehensive overview of Dorfman’s career.

Though some artists continue the long tradition of creating a “true likeness” of their external appearance, others choose to subvert the notion of a traditional self-portrait. Personal Space: Self-Portraits on Paper presents approximately 60 contemporary self-portraits on paper, primarily prints and drawings from the MFA’s collection, by major artists known particularly for their focus on self-portraiture—such as Käthe Kollwitz and Jim Dine—as well as younger artists whose conceptual frameworks expand the definition of the genre.

“Self-portraits have always been more complex than a straightforward depiction," said Patrick Murphy, Lia and William Poorvu Assistant Curator of Prints and Drawings and Supervisor, Morse Study Room. “The self-portraits Rembrandt made throughout his life often had an element of myth making. Many of the artists in this exhibition use self-portraiture not just to say, ‘This is how I look,’ but to explore how issues of race, gender and identity shape our sense of self.”

The exhibition includes recent acquisitions on view for the first time, including Glenn Ligon’s Runaways (1993). The print series mimics the language and tone of 19th-century broadsides advertising runaway slaves, but substitutes laconic descriptions of Ligon written by his friends, forming a kind of composite self-portrait. Also recently acquired is Balding (2017), a set of 21 meticulously rendered drawings by Cobi Moules, an alumnus of the School of the Museum of Fine Arts at Tufts University, in which the artist—who is transitioning from female to male—uses extraordinary candor and humor to explore the many possibilities that await his future self. Moules is one of several local artists included in the exhibition, alongside Allan Rohan Crite, Jess T. Dugan, Michael Mazur and John Wilson.

Many of the works on view are conceptual rather than representational. Willie Cole’s Man Spirit Mask (1991), for example, is a metaphorical triptych that uses the symbol of the household iron to suggest domestic servitude, the branding of slaves and the shape of African masks. Additional highlights include Booster (1967), a monumental lithograph by Robert Rauschenberg that uses x-rays of the artist’s own body; an untitled lithograph (1990) by Kiki Smith in which Xerox transfers of the artist’s tangled hair become a Pollock-like abstraction; and Invisible (2004) by Kyung Sook Koo, made from impressions of the artist’s body covered in bubble wrap.

About the Museum of Fine Arts, Boston

Founded on February 4, 1870, the Museum of Fine Arts, Boston (MFA), stands on the historic homelands of the Massachusett people, a site which has long served as a place of meeting and exchange among different nations. The Museum opened its doors to the public on July 4, 1876—the nation’s centennial—at its original location in Copley Square. Over the next several decades, the MFA’s collection and visitation grew exponentially, and in 1909, the Museum moved to its current home on Huntington Avenue. Today, the MFA houses a global collection encompassing nearly 500,000 works of art, from ancient to contemporary, and welcomes approximately 1.2 million visitors each year to celebrate the human experience through art as well as innovative exhibitions and programs. In 2017, Matthew Teitelbaum, the 11th director in the Museum’s history, unveiled MFA 2020, a three-year Strategic Plan that articulated a forward-looking vision for the Museum to become an institution of the moment and more connected to the community. The spirit of collaboration and engagement at the core of MFA 2020 has been brought to life over the past three years through the implementation of more than 50 initiatives, the full slate of which will be realized during the Museum’s 150th anniversary year.

Open seven days a week, the MFA’s hours are Saturday through Tuesday, 10 am–5 pm; and Wednesday through Friday, 10 am–10 pm. Admission is free for MFA Members, University Members and youths age 17 and younger. Wednesday nights after 4 pm admission is by voluntary contribution (suggested donation $25) and is free to all visitors during Martin Luther King Jr. Day, the Lunar New Year Celebration, Memorial Day, Free Fun Friday and Indigenous Peoples' Day. Admission (which includes one repeat visit within 10 days) is $25 for adults and $23 for seniors and students age 18 and older, and includes entry to all galleries and special exhibitions. The Museum’s mobile MFA Guide is available at ticket desks and the Sharf Visitor Center for $5, members; $6, non-members; and $4, youths. The Museum is closed on New Year’s Day, Patriots’ Day, Independence Day, Thanksgiving, and Christmas. The MFA is located on the Avenue of the Arts at 465 Huntington Avenue, Boston, MA 02115. For more information, call 617.267.9300, visit mfa.org or follow the MFA on Facebook, Twitter and Instagram.