Howard Harrison Glaser (aka Howard Harrison) died at his home in Highmount, N.Y., on February 10, 2020, at age 84 from cancer. He was born on November 30, 1935, in Boston, Mass., to William (Billy) Harrison Glaser and Lillian Rose Riseman. Howard’s father was a family doctor whose practice was on the ground floor of their home on Commonwealth Avenue.
In his early years, during WW II, Howard recalled gathering tinfoil from gum wrappers and cigarette packs to help the war effort. Starting at age 5, he was sent to camp in New Hampshire for entire summers and considered it a wonderful experience, particularly liking to recount that he was voted the youngest mayor of Camp Kenwood in its history. Also at a young age, he discovered skiing and would strap a couple of boards on his boots and spend happy hours skiing down a little hill in his back yard. As a teenager, Howard rode a 3-speed Schwinn bicycle from Boston to Newfoundland, Canada, with a YMCA youth group, cementing his lifelong love of cycling.
Howard attended Boston Latin, River Country Day and then Harvard. At Harvard he became the manager of the varsity hockey team and often recounted the positive influence of Coach Ralph Weiland and the thrill of making it to the NCAA hockey championships. It was through his involvement with hockey that he landed a job with the Boston Herald Traveler as a campus correspondent. At Harvard, he also built sets for theater productions, learning carpentry skills that served him well in future renovation projects.
After graduating, Howard left Boston for New York City, where he lived for the next 43 years. Aside from a short stint as an editor and staff writer at Great American Publications, he was self-employed as both a photographer and a writer, publishing his work in magazines such as Sports Illustrated, Art in America, SKI and Popular Photography. For a number of years he was a contributing editor for Camera 35. Among other projects during this time, he created a rollicking folk/rock film for Elektra Records of Spider John Koerner’s song "Red Palace" (available on YouTube).
Among the highlights of Howard’s photography career were taking the photo of Bob Dylan announcing his first ever concert, held at Carnegie Hall in 1963, and shooting the Daytona 500’s inaugural high-speed banked track from the precarious perch of a Bell helicopter. In 1963 he founded Studio X, a photographic service catering to the processing needs of advertising agencies, corporations, publications and individual photographers. Though not a professionally trained architect, he designed and renovated several of his own studios and residences.
In 1960, a photo assignment brought Howard to the Catskills and its ski slopes, which reignited his love of skiing. Soon he was spending weekends skiing at Plattekill Mountain, and joined the ski patrol. Eventually he found a place in Highmount that became his haven from the frenetic pace of city life. In 2000, when commercial digital photography started to surpass film and rents crept up, Howard closed Studio X and moved full-time to Highmount.
After 33 years as a ski patroller, he began teaching skiing, first at Belleayre and Hunter in the Catskills and finally for 10 years in Aspen, Colo. A natural teacher, he found this career especially rewarding. During this period Howard also rediscovered his passion for creative photography and the freedom to explore whatever captured his eye, whether a flower or an old barn. He had a number of shows of his work in the area and leaves behind a vast collection of images. His eye for beauty shaped everything Howard did, from the way he set a table, to how he cooked a meal, to how he arranged wildflowers gathered along a roadside. Besides all this, he had a wacky, off-kilter sense of humor. He was a fun guy.
A celebration of Howard’s life was held in Highmount in the summer of 2023. Howard was predeceased by his sister, Nancy Katz. He is survived by his wife, Blythe Carey, sons William Harrison Glaser, Duncan Carey Glaser, and Liam Edward Glaser, and three grandchildren.
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