It almost feels as though the camera is floating through space, and the violins are planets. There is a sense of rushing movement, of racing across the top of the instrument, as though the viewer were a molecule of air moved by the sound the instrument is making. And off in the distance, that sound seems to be made visible, a swirl of light like the aurora borealis. It could also be a digital effect. But it’s not.
It is the result of a technique honed by New Haven-area photographer Harold Shapiro to create “Luminous Instruments,” running now in the gallery at Creative Arts Workshop on Audubon Street until April 9. With his dynamic, sometimes vertiginous photographs, Shapiro said that he was “trying to visually get the sound of music coming out of the instrument.” As the dozen or so photographs in the exhibit suggest — some of them large enough to take up a gallery wall, others more portrait sized — Shapiro succeeded.
For this particular image, Shapiro said, “I was thinking of the word ‘flyolin,’ like ‘flying violin.’” He borrowed a few instruments from the Wallingford-based violin shop of Ute Brinkmann. “The un-valuable ones, I can stack on top of each other and not worry about it. The valuable instruments, I treat like gold.”
”The front of the lens is an inch away from the close violin,” Shapiro said. He shot with a wide-angle lens. “I can look through the camera. I have the violin in my hand,” he said. The blur is the blur of the violin’s movement.
The Connecticut-born and raised Shapiro has been a full-time photographer since 1981, “so it’s nearly 40 years, which is hard to believe,” he said. “I’ve been teaching almost that long as well” — at Creative Arts Workshop (where he is now head of the photography department), Guilford Arts Center, and Milford Photo. He counts Yale University as a major client, including its law school, school of management, medical school, and school of music. He recounted a particular highlight of photographing an event at the law school about constitutional law. “They have Supreme Court justices from all over the world. We get ready for a group picture and I ask them to all rise, and they actually do,” Shapiro said.
Shapiro also believes in using art to try to help people. He has photography projects at Columbus House with formerly homeless people and people with psychiatric disorder. As a musician, he has played at Yale-New Haven Hospital on Christmas Eve for 30 years. “My wife goes with me and we go room to room, and we have an amazing visit,” Shapiro said. “I love how the arts can be helpful to people in need.”
But “Luminous Instruments,” Shapiro said, “is just me saying, ‘let my express myself the best way I can with my art, and combining music and art is perfect for me.” In a sense, it’s the realization of ideas that began forming when Shapiro was a child.
Shapiro.
Shapiro grew up on a dairy and vegetable farm in North Branford. “When I was a little kid I played with light bulbs and flashlights and toy trains,” Shapiro said. “I developed this interest in seeing and light. That’s really what brought me to photography.” In high school he got a chance to work in a darkroom. “Seeing the image come out in the darkroom, I nearly fainted,” he said.
Shapiro also began playing music as a child, first with his sister. He was in the youth symphony at Neighborhood Music School. He got involved in theater, “and again, more lighting,” Shapiro said. “All of it became connected.” In 1979, he took what he called the “first night photograph I really liked.”
Shapiro recalled that the kernel of the idea for “Luminous Instruments” came to him in 1980, when he was sitting in a pit orchestra in Clinton’s town hall. “I think it was Damn Yankees,” he said. “I was looking at my bass clarinet, and thought, ‘look at those keys, they’re beautiful.’” He turned his camera to and created what he called “nice, solid still-life pictures.” It didn’t go farther than that, but the idea lingered.
Then, last year, Shapiro was photographing an opening at the Yale Center for British Art, which had put up an exhibit on early photography. “Early photographs needed long exposures, and I love long exposures at night,” Shapiro said. “‘Why don’t I try long exposures in the studio?’” he recalled thinking.
He “went back to instruments,” he said. “I found this flute at a thrift store for $33. It’s very photogenic. I clamped it to two tripods and wiggled my hands around it. They looked like ghost hands.”
The results were promising, so he collected more instruments — trumpets, saxophones, trombones, violins. At first he clamped the instruments down, and “the only thing moving was my hands,” Shapiro said. “But then I unleashed the instruments, and it got much more creative and much more interesting. The picture became much more powerful.”
He found himself sticking with black and white. “It was about the movement and the feeling. One of my musical heroes is Leonard Bernstein — his conducting, his composing, his teaching,” Shapiro said. He was listening to one of Bernstein’s recorded concerts for young people while working in his photography studio. “When I started doing these photographs, I heard him say, very clearly, ‘music is movement.’ It felt like from the grave he was telling me to keep going.”
It took some time to figure out how to get the images he wanted. For one brass still life, it took “39 tries before I got to the good one,” Shapiro said. “Sometimes you see me by accident,” or “the movement just does not look good.” And, “sometimes it doesn’t take long for the feeling of the movement to be right. Luckily with digital photography,” which he adopted in 2003, “you can see if it’s working.”
It helped that the designs of so many instruments are so intrinsically interesting. A saxophone, for example — “it’s almost like a flower, just a very beautiful thing,” Shapiro said. Though it was also a practical design; the larger saxophones curve, for example, so that the player can reach all the keys easily. The appearance of mass-produced brass instruments was also about the rise of industry in the 19th century. “That was the time of the rise of the city as well,” as well.
In that sense, the instruments connect to the industrial past of the Northeast. One of Shapiro’s past clients had been United Illuminating, which at one point let him photograph English Station in New Haven. He was reminded of that when another photography project took him to the Powell flute factory in Massachusetts. He spent all day there. “They make many of the finest flutes in the world,” Shapiro said. “All these platinum and gold and silver tubes they start with — it felt a little like being in the power plant. It was like heaven being there.”
“They really care about making beautiful instruments that sing, and I thought, ‘these are my people,’” he added.
Shapiro received a grant from the Bitsie Clark Fund this year to create “Luminous Instruments,” and it’s easy to see why. Shapiro’s technique with the camera makes the products of the complicated photo shoots he created for himself seem effortless and free, like one happy accident after another. They capture the kind of lightness and spontaneity that perhaps is only possible after decades of diligent practice. Not unlike the best kind of music.
“Luminous Instruments” runs at Creative Arts Workshop, 80 Audubon St., through April 9. Visit CAW’s website for hours and more information. In addition, Shapiro is scheduled to give two gallery talks about his work, March 14 and March 28, both at 11 a.m.
