[1] Until 1957 he and seven others operated as Koodin-Lapow, with Ben Koodin directing selling, and he in charge of packaging design[5] for R. H. Macys, Wamsutta Mills, Seagram, Startex[6] and Rokeach, among others.
[10] After the War as the business expanded they hired young Cooper Union graduates Milton Glaser, Seymour Chwast and Edward Sorel.
[26] 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,[27] that toured the world and was seen by 9 million visitors.
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.
John Gabree, reviewing it for Newsday remarks that; Sometimes the human beings who inhabit Harry Lapow's Coney Island look less like people than like geological phenomena, mountains especially, or rocks strewn on the beach.
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; ...his photographs of the '70s that seem most confident and perceptive.
A 1975 portrait of two elderly women in bathing caps strolling along the shoreline is particularly poignant; both their halting stances and facial expressions, caught unaware, are effectingly vulnerable.
[27] In 1983, son Gary produced a special performance at La Peña Cultural Center in Berkeley, incorporating projections of Harry's Coney Island imagery,[60][61] and remembered his father's encouragment to "be creative.