Artist and Harvard resident Doug Slade’s latest show, Film Strip 20ʺ 20,ʺ is in the public library browsing room now, and will remain at least through the month of February. Although Slade has other explanations for the publicity poster’s photograph of a white heart on a red-washed wood background, one way to see the show is as Slade’s Valentine to the town. Ten photos of special places in Harvard, taken over the past 20 years, have been digitized, tweaked, and printed on 20-inch by 20-inch squares of poster board. Seen together, they capture some of what there is to love about Harvard—its history and beauty, and even one of its quirky controversies.
Doug Slade stands in front of photos from his show, Film Strip 20ʺ 20,ʺ in the library browsing room. (Courtesy photo)
The photographs are in black and white; “You can’t get any better than black and white,” said Slade. His friend Joe Ofria, a graphic artist with a studio in Groton, digitizes the photos and tweaks them. Then Alpha Graphics (owned by Harvard resident Jeff Schwartz) prints each photo on coroplast, a corrugated plastic. The finished product is lightweight, easy to transport and to hang.
Equally as eye-catching as the subject is the “frame” of each photo. On two sides is a inch-and-a-half margin of filmstrip, with white squares rather than a series of images. As Slade tells the story, the idea came to him one day as he sat in the browsing room looking at his heart photo. He recalled a poster he had made for a showing of “Dr. Jekyll and Mr. Hyde” at the Historical Society about five years ago. Because it was an old movie, he had made a filmstrip border around the picture of Lon Chaney looking maniacal. Suddenly he had the inspiration to use filmstrip as a border for the heart. From there it was an easy step to imagine a number of his photos all framed in filmstrip. “It’s become a logo,” he said.
Slade began the gallery walk in the far right-hand corner of the room, with a photo of the Shaker herb drying house on Shaker Road. After the Community Preservation Committee granted funding, the town restored the 1848 Shaker stone building that had played such a prominent part in the economic life of the village. Slade’s photo is enhanced with brightness and touches of color that seem to reflect the building’s restoration, and the lush greenery of its setting suggests the herbs themselves. Slade said the picture is in the perfect spot to be highlighted by the afternoon sun.
Agricultural past and present
Looking across the room to the opposite wall is “Crop Circles,” a photo of three rolled hay bales set in an open field with rows of uncut hay behind them. No color has been added, though more texture has been given to the grass, and the original photo has been compressed to get the bales closer to one another. The picture is simple and natural, and it pays tribute to Harvard’s agricultural past and present.
Crop Circles. (Courtesy photo)
On the wall facing the pond are two more scenes connected to Harvard’s past. The top half of Memory, the Civil War monument, is backed by branching of yellow and the brick-red color of the old library. The flowers she holds have been tinted. While interesting, one might find this rendering departs too far from the original photo and the solemnity of the monument itself.
A picture of a dilapidated barn on Bare Hill Road at the Houghton/ Sprague garrison house captures a vanished building once part of one of Harvard’s earliest houses. Slade said he used to spend time taking pictures at this site. The barn had been condemned, but for years it was not demolished because white bats stopped there on migration.
A picture of Bowers Brook in winter was taken the year Harvard had 100 feet of snow, said Slade. The brook winds through the trees whose shadows are cast on the crusted snow. This photo, like others, has been given some color. Slade concurs that opinions may differ here on whether that adds to or detracts from the beauty of the black and white.
Across the room is another barn, this one the ruins of the Shaker barn on South Shaker Road. Here is just the window cut in a thick stone wall. This photo, along with that of the herb house, is a reminder of an important part of the town’s history.
The metal pile
“The Metal Pile” has a different kind of beauty and can be seen just for what it is. Slade intends it to also allude to a recent controversy at the Transfer Station: Should residents be allowed to pick in the metal pile?
The real story behind the heart on the wood? Years ago when Clinton Shores was undergoing real changes, Slade found a wooden outhouse door, all “cracked and beat up.” A small opening in the shape of a heart was near the top. Slade brought the door to the Historical Society as a relic of a bygone time. It is a piece that continues to fascinate him, and the enlarged heart in his photo speaks to, among other things, his longtime love affair with heart images and his personal connections to other artists who have also loved them.
Slade has worked in different mediums and styles and has shown and sold his work in Provincetown and Wellfleet, as well as locally in Harvard, Littleton, and Concord. He started photography in the early 1970s, when he was inspired by photo exhibits and by seeing photos on rock band album covers and artists like Dali and Cocteau working with photography. His first professional camera was a Nikkomat, and he has always loved black and white. He took a lot of pictures around town for the Harvard Post and had two photography shows in the former public library. Of this show he said, “This is a learning process. I’m happy with the way it’s working out.”
Slade spends a lot of time in the browsing room and he loves it when the kids come in and he sees them standing in front of his pictures. He hopes they enjoy looking at them and that the exhibit may even inspire them to go out looking for the scenes in the photos or for pictures of their own.
