The Middletown Press (Middletown, CT)
An EYE for MUSIC
Harold Shapiro’s ‘Luminous Instruments’ opening at CAW
Harold Shapiro of Guilford, who has an exhibit of music-themed photos opening Monday in New Haven, loved playing with light as a child. Not to make photos, but just for fun after being inspired by his father’s repairs on the family farm in North Branford.
“I loved playing with bulbs and would get a battery and a piece of wire and make them light up,” said Shapiro. “And then I would have a big shadow on the wall, like a tiny animal and project his shadow on the wall. I loved that sort of thing.”
One of Shapiro’s three older sisters showed him the fingerings on a saxophone in third grade, “and in under 10 minutes I knew every single note on a saxophone,” he said, moving soon to clarinet
and bassoon before taking lessons on flute in high school.
Light and music combine all the time for Shapiro, 59, who has had a long career as a musician, corporate and institutional photographer and instructor at the Creative Arts Workshop. On Monday, he’ll add artist exhibitor to the list when his solo exhibit, “Luminous Instruments,” opens at the CAW gallery on Audubon Street in New Haven.
In a series of 15 photos (three of them oversized) for this modest show, Shapiro plays with light and long exposures to infuse images of musical instruments with dynamism. He traces the idea to a time when he was a young man in the pits — not of despair but bliss.
Shapiro became a theater pit musician in 1978 and remembers his first gig at the Thomaston Opera House. His sister, working there on a CETA grant, was playing in the orchestra and he was brought in for one show, “South Pacific.”
“That was just like heaven,” he said of the experience of working with professional musicians on a theatrical show.
After that, he played eight years at a New Haven dinner theater, Goodspeed and other places. One night at a gig, something struck him.
“I’m sitting in a pit in 1980 and I saw the keys of my instruments and I thought, ‘Wow, they’re so interesting looking,’ so I started photographing them way back then doing still-life photographs. People liked them, but nobody went wild for them.”
A year later he graduated from a two-year photography program in Boston in color and portraiture, “which is a good thing because about 90 percent of professional photography is about people.”
And a few years after that, he began teaching photography. CAW’s students are mostly adults, and one class has been together for 25 years, through illnesses and loss, he said. Like a family.
Ask him how he created the photos and he’ll say he prefers more of a why-to than a how-to.
“The why is to explore your passion and really dig deep,” he said. “My intention was to try to get the feel of music and the sound that comes out of the instruments visually.”
It helps that one of his specialties is night photography, Shapiro said, “so this brings together my love of instruments, long exposures (and) obviously lighting, which I adore.”
After he started work on the project, he was listening to the late Leonard Bernstein and his “Young People’s Concerts,” when he had an aha! moment. “It felt like he was saying it directly to me. He said, ‘Music is movement’ and I’m like yes! From beyond, he’s giving me affirmation to keep moving with this.”
But on the local level, legendary New Haven arts patron Bitsie Clark really propelled this exhibit, since Shapiro’s exhibit plan recently won The Bitsie Clark Fund for Artists Grant, enabling Shapiro to have the exhibit and talks at the arts workshop. (He’ll also speak at Cooperative Arts and Humanities High School in New Haven about passion, art and music.)
Shapiro also has a goal to mount the exhibit at museums that show musical instruments; in fact, he already has four photos from this series at the Yale Collection of Musical Instruments on Hillhouse Avenue. And he’d like to see education and performances paired with the exhibit, which he considers the culmination of his career.
Music also has taken him into volunteer work, with the group SARAH to work with Down syndrome adults and (for 30 years) playing his flute for patients at Yale New Haven Hospital.
“We (he and his wife, Marji) had an amazing visit with many people at the hospital. We spent four hours there on Christmas Eve ... at most of the adult settings because they tend to get less attention than the kids do.”
Some would call that a luminous idea.