No Hair Day | |
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Directed by | Bob Burns |
Produced by | Bob Burns |
Starring |
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Cinematography | Bob Burns |
Edited by | Bob Burns |
Production company | Cambridge Studios Inc. |
Distributed by | WGBH |
Release date |
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Running time | 60 minutes |
Country | United States |
Language | English |
No Hair Day: Laughing (and Crying) Our Way Through Cancer is a 1999 documentary film about a photo-shoot of three women undergoing treatment for breast cancer, which was broadcast on PBS on October 10, 2001, as part of the Independent Lens series [1] and on WGBX-TV. [2]
Bob Burns of Cambridge Studios in Boston, Massachusetts filmed portrait artist Elsa Dorfman on 12 March 1998 taking large format 20x24 Polaroid photos of his wife, Debbie Dorsey, along with Libby Levinson and Carol Potoff as they posed in "chemo chic". [3] The women had met in a breast cancer support group, and all had lost their hair to chemotherapy at the time. [4] The hour-long documentary was produced by WGBH-TV. [5] The photos and film were exhibited by the DeCordova Museum from September 2000 to January 2001. [6] [7] [8] A decade later, the photos will be on display at the Danforth Museum of Art in Framingham, MA from September 11 - November 6, 2011. [9]
Dorfman released a book of the same name in 2004 featuring the photographs of the shoot. [10] [11] She has said of the shoot that "The pictures are so perfect. The subject was so touching. I don't think I will have another day like that." [12]
Thomas Francis Dorsey Jr. was an American jazz trombonist, composer, conductor and bandleader of the big band era. He was known as the "Sentimental Gentleman of Swing" because of his smooth-toned trombone playing. His theme song was "I'm Getting Sentimental Over You". His technical skill on the trombone gave him renown among other musicians. He was the younger brother of bandleader Jimmy Dorsey. After Dorsey broke with his brother in the mid-1930s, he led an extremely successful band from the late 1930s into the 1950s. He is best remembered for standards such as "Opus One", "Song of India", "Marie", "On Treasure Island", and his biggest hit single, "I'll Never Smile Again".
Elsa B. Dorfman was an American portrait photographer. She worked in Cambridge, Massachusetts, and was known for her use of a large-format instant Polaroid camera.
Arno Rafael Minkkinen is a Finnish-American photographer who works in the United States.
Joe Zane is an American artist. His work uses painting, sculpture, video, performance and self-deprecating humour to address the themes of authenticity and the role of the artist. He currently lives in Cambridge, MA and previously worked at the Center for Advanced Visual Studies at MIT.
Esther Geller was an American painter mainly associated with the abstract expressionist movement in Boston in the 1940s and 1950s. She was one of the foremost authorities on encaustic painting techniques.
Harvey Allen Silverglate is an American attorney, journalist, writer, and the co-founder of the Foundation for Individual Rights and Expression (FIRE).
Jack Wolfe was a 20th-century American painter most known for his abstract art, portraiture, and political paintings.
Stephen DiRado is an American photographer. His work is mostly black-and-white, and he makes frequent use of large-format cameras. He is most noted for his portraiture, night-astronomical photography, and semi-composed group photography, and for the extensive length of his projects.
David Aronson was a painter and Professor of Art at Boston University.
The Polaroid 20×24 camera is a very large instant camera made by Polaroid, with film plates that measure a nominal 20 by 24 inches, giving the camera its name, although at least one camera takes pictures that are 23 by 36 inches.
Rachel Perry is an American artist. She is known for conceptual works using drawing, photography, video, collage, sculpture and performance, which address “the fleeting nature of experience, the elusiveness of desire, and the persistence of objects in a throwaway culture.” Art critic Jerry Saltz has written that her work "not only grappl[es] with consumerism but [she is] just about swallowed whole by it.” Her work also considers themes of gender identity, narcissism, privacy and information overload.
Sage Sohier is an American photographer and educator.
Boston Expressionism is an arts movement marked by emotional directness, dark humor, social and spiritual themes, and a tendency toward figuration strong enough that Boston Figurative Expressionism is sometimes used as an alternate term to distinguish it from abstract expressionism, with which it overlapped.
Barbara Swan (1922–2003), also known by her married name, Barbara Swan Fink, was an American painter, illustrator, and lithographer. Her early work is associated with the Boston Expressionist school; later she became known for her still-life paintings in which light is refracted through glass and water, and for her portraits. She is also known for her collaboration with the poets Anne Sexton and Maxine Kumin, and for her archived correspondence with various artists and writers.
Jules Aarons was an American space physicist known for his study of radio-wave propagation, and a photographer known for his street photography in Boston.
Mary Lum is an American visual artist whose paintings, collages and works on paper reference the urban environment, architectural forms and systems. Critic John Yau writes, "Mary Lum’s paintings on paper are based on collages, which are made from things she uses or encounters in her everyday life as well as photographs she takes of the places she visits. "
Barbara Grad is an American artist and educator, known for abstract, fractured landscape paintings, which combine organic and geometric forms, colliding planes and patterns, and multiple perspectives. Her work's themes include the instability of experience, the ephemerality of nature, and the complexity of navigating cultural environments in flux. While best known as a painter, Grad also produces drawings, prints, mixed-media works and artist books. She has exhibited in venues including the Art Institute of Chicago, Kemper Museum of Contemporary Art, Danforth Art, Rose Art Museum, Indianapolis Museum of Art and A.I.R., and been reviewed in publications, including Artforum, Arts Magazine and ARTnews. Grad co-founded Artemisia Gallery, one the country's first women-artist collectives, in Chicago in 1973. She has been an educator for over four decades, most notably at the Massachusetts College of Art and Design. Grad has been based in the Boston area since 1987.
Clint Baclawski is a Boston-based artist who works with photography and light, shooting on an analog camera and transforms the prints into light-filled installation pieces.
J. R. Uretsky is an artist, performer, musician and art curator living in Providence, Rhode Island.
Georgia Shuset Litwack was born in January 27 in Pennsylvania. She was an American photographer and photojournalist, best known for her portraits of notable women in the arts, science and technology.