Harry Lapow

Fotofolio, the postcard company, distributed several Lapow images. Robert L. Pincus, reviewing Lapow's 1981 joint show with John Brumfield and Lou Stoumen at G. Ray Hawkins Gallery in Los Angeles considered that it was;

One of Lapow's early photographs of an Italian wedding on the beach at Coney Island was selected by Edward Steichen for The Family of Man exhibition at the Museum of Modern Art, that toured the world and was seen by 9 million visitors. Jerry Mason's follow-up publication The Family of Women of 1979 included Lapow's photograph of an older woman wheeling her bicycle.

In 1978 Dover Publications published a book of his Coney Island work, Coney Island Beach People, one hundred and thirty-eight full-page or slightly cropped medium-format images arranged for their visual connections rather than chronologically. In his introduction, David Toor writes that;

Still photographing at 67 and living in Greenwich Village, Lapow was vocal in widely-syndicated articles in the press and on television the in mid-1970s against ageism and enforced retirement. His wife Ruth died in 1979. He was survived by his folk-singer son Gary in Berkeley, for whose album Bamboo in the Wind Harry photographed the cover, and daughter, the artist/designer Marcelle Lapow Toor, whose husband SUNY English lecturer David wrote the introduction to the 1978 Dover monograph, and who until her death in 2009 was executor for Lapow's estate and maintained his archive. In 1983, son Gary produced a special performance at La Peña Cultural Center in Berkeley, incorporating projections of Harry's Coney Island imagery, and remembered his father's encouragment to "be creative."

During the 1960s Lapow studied painting with Evsa Model, Lisette's husband, but he continued photographing, mostly at Coney Island, in spare time available from his career in package design;

Helen Gee gave Lapow his first exhibition at her Limelight Gallery in Greenwich Village in 1959. He also showed in group exhibitions at A Photographer's Gallery, New York, Washington, DC, Photokina in Cologne, Vu Par Cultural Center in Paris, and at Expo 67, Montreal, Canada. In 1970 he held a joint show at Ashland College devoted to Coney Island with poet Mark McCloskey in which the latter showed verse in black-on-gray panels interspersed by Lapow's monochrome photographs. The show followed another early that year which included the two at the State University College at Potsdam Lapow presented lectures on his work, including on at the State University College in 1975, and at Tompkins Cortland Community College in 1978.

Until 1957 he and seven others operated as Koodin-Lapow, with Ben Koodin directing selling, and he in charge of packaging design for R. H. Macys, Wamsutta Mills, Seagram, Startex and Rokeach, among others. He set up on his own as Harry Lapow Associates in 1960, seeking more freedom for his photography, and added clients including Peter Pan Foundations.

After the War as the business expanded they hired young Cooper Union graduates Milton Glaser, Seymour Chwast and Edward Sorel. He was one of 13 founding members of the Package Designers Council. In a 1957 newspaper article he described trends of visibility and 'buy-me' designs in packaging as overworked clichés, advocating instead for consideration by designers of 'bagability,' easy opening and dispensing of contents, portability and 'giftability.' By the mid-1960s he was corporate design director with the firm Lehn & Fink Products Corporation from 1962 and wrote articles for the journal Packaging Design on a variety of topics including the use of flocked paper, the role of research in packaging design, and expressed concerns about the 1967 US Federal Fair Packaging and Labeling Act, complaining that it would "play havoc with our designs."

Lapow took courses with his near-contemporaries Lisette Model and Sid Grossman at The New School for Social Research together with his good friend, Leon Levinstein, using a second-hand 6x6 twin-lens reflex Ciroflex camera that he received for his forty-third birthday in 1952, Asked what he was looking for to photograph, he replied "I don't look for anything; the photograph looks for me. When I see something I have to shoot it."

For over 25 years, between 1952 and 1977, Lapow took photographs of Coney Island, as both Model and Grossman did, and as other significant photographers had, including Weegee.

Harry Lapow (February 6, 1909 – September 14, 1982) was an American photographer and graphic designer.

Born in Newark, New Jersey, in 1909, Lapow took art classes while in high school and after graduation, aged 15 he trained in commercial art before in 1934 he moved to New York City to work for package designer Martin Ullman and married Ruth Benzer in February that year. Lapow registered for the US Army draft in October 1940.