Contact

info@photographywest.com

Paul Caponigro

Paul Caponigro

1932

Paul Caponigro was born in Boston in 1932. His earliest artistic interest was in music. When he was thirteen, he began to explore the world around him with his camera and studie...

Paul Caponigro

Biography

Paul Caponigro was born in Boston in 1932. His earliest artistic interest was in music. When he was thirteen, he began to explore the world around him with his camera and studied with Benjamin Chin, Alfred S. Richter and Minor White. He became a teaching assistant to White in 1959, and has since taught, exhibited and published extensively for more than seventy years. He is currently regarded as one of America’s foremost landscape photographers.

Acclaimed for his spiritually moving images of Stonehenge and other Celtic megaliths of England and Ireland, Caponigro has also photographed the temples, shrines and sacred gardens of Japan and inspires viewers with glimpses of deep, mystical woodland of his New England haunts. Caponigro approaches nature receptively, preferring to utilize an intuitive focus rather that merely arranging or recording forms and surface details. He is interested in the idea that photography can be a teacher and that the process of making photographs can reveal basic truths: “All the I have achieved are these dreams locked in silver. Through this work it was possible, if only for brief moments, to sense the thread which holds all things together. The world, the unity of force and movement, could be seen in nature – in a face, a stone, or a patch of sunlight. The subtle suggestions generated by configurations of cloud and stone, of shape and tone, made of the photograph a meeting place, from which to continue on an even more adventurous journey through a landscape of reflection, of introspection” (Landscape, New York: McGraw-Hill, 1975, p. 67).

Music has always been an essential aspect of his life. Although he shifted from the piano to photography early in his artistic career, he remains a dedicated pianist and believes his musical training and insight contributes significantly to his photographic imagery. In his photographs the visual ‘silence’ becomes as tangible as ‘sound’.

Paul Caponigro has exhibited and taught throughout the United States and abroad. He is the recipient of two Guggenheim Fellowships and three National Endowment for the Arts (NEA) grants, Caponigro’s images will be found in the photographic collections of most museums, texts on the history of photography and is one of the undisputed masters of photography.

Original Photographs

Your Collection

Wall is empty.