Photography career

Caponigro was born in Boston, Massachusetts. He studied with Minor White

Minor White

Minor Martin White was an American photographer born in Minneapolis, Minnesota.White earned a degree in botany with a minor in English from the University of Minnesota in 1933. His first creative efforts were in poetry, as he took five years thereafter to complete a sequence of 100 sonnets while...

 and has been awarded two Guggenheim Fellowship

Guggenheim Fellowship

Guggenheim Fellowships are American grants that have been awarded annually since 1925 by the John Simon Guggenheim Memorial Foundation to those "who have demonstrated exceptional capacity for productive scholarship or exceptional creative ability in the arts." Each year, the foundation makes...

s and three grants from the NEA

National Endowment for the Arts

The National Endowment for the Arts is an independent agency of the United States federal government that offers support and funding for projects exhibiting artistic excellence. It was created by an act of the U.S. Congress in 1965 as an independent agency of the federal government. Its current...

. His best known photograph is Running White Deer.
Caponigro's first one-man exhibition took place at the George Eastman

George Eastman

George Eastman was an American innovator and entrepreneur who founded the Eastman Kodak Company and invented roll film, helping to bring photography to the mainstream...

 House in 1958. In the 1960s Caponigro taught photography

Photography

Photography is the art, science and practice of creating durable images by recording light or other electromagnetic radiation, either electronically by means of an image sensor or chemically by means of a light-sensitive material such as photographic film...

 part-time at Boston University

Boston University

Boston University is a private research university located in Boston, Massachusetts. With more than 4,000 faculty members and more than 31,000 students, Boston University is one of the largest private universities in the United States and one of Boston's largest employers...

 while consulting the Polaroid Corporation

Polaroid Corporation

Polaroid Corporation is an American-based international consumer electronics and eyewear company, originally founded in 1937 by Edwin H. Land. It is most famous for its instant film cameras, which reached the market in 1948, and continued to be the company's flagship product line until the February...

 on various technical research.

Caponigro's work is included in the collections of the Guggenheim

Guggenheim

Guggenheim may refer to:* Benjamin Guggenheim* Charles Guggenheim* Davis Guggenheim* Guggenheim Building* Guggenheim family* Guggenheim Fellowship* Guggenheim Museum * Harry Frank Guggenheim* John Simon Guggenheim Memorial Foundation...

, Whitney

Whitney Museum of American Art

The Whitney Museum of American Art, often referred to simply as "the Whitney", is an art museum with a focus on 20th- and 21st-century American art. Located at 945 Madison Avenue at 75th Street in New York City, the Whitney's permanent collection contains more than 18,000 works in a wide variety of...

, Norton Simon Museum

Norton Simon Museum

The Norton Simon Museum is an Art Museum located in Pasadena, California, United States. It was previously known by the names: the Pasadena Art Institute and the Pasadena Art Museum.-Overview:...

, Museum of New Mexico

Museum of New Mexico

The Museum of New Mexico consists of six separate institutions in Santa Fe, New Mexico, including :* New Mexico Museum of Art* Palace of the Governors* Museum of Indian Arts & Culture/Laboratory of Anthropology* Museum of International Folk Art...

 and San Francisco Museum of Modern Art

San Francisco Museum of Modern Art

The San Francisco Museum of Modern Art is a modern art museum located in San Francisco, California. A nonprofit organization, SFMOMA holds an internationally recognized collection of modern and contemporary art and was the first museum on the West Coast devoted solely to 20th century art...

.
His son, John Paul Caponigro

John Paul Caponigro

John Paul Caponigro is an Environmental Fine Art Landscape Photographer. He is the son of the American photographer Paul Caponigro and Eleanor Caponigro a graphic designer. John Paul attended Yale University, and the University of California, Santa Cruz where he was trained as a painter and later...

, is a noted digital photographic artist.

Quotes

• “I often see the materials of photography as being a type of terrain. Emulsions, liquid developers, silver salts, and fixers interact, and I construct a landscape that I need to first explore in my mind’s eye if I am to make it manifest as an artful image in silver.”
• "Photography is a medium, a language, through which I might come to experience directly, live more closely with, the interaction between myself and nature."
• "At the root of creativity is an impulse to understand, to make sense of random and often unrelated details. For me, photography provides an intersection of time, space, light, and emotional stance. One needs to be still enough, observant enough, and aware enough to recognize the life of the materials, to be able to 'hear through the eyes'."

Books

• Veiled Yet Revealed: Masterworks from Fifty Years
• Paul Caponigro: Masterworks of Forty Years
• Paul Caponigro - New England Days
• Paul Caponigro: Of the Earth, Still Life Studies 2001~2004
• Megaliths
• [New England Days ISBN 978-1-56792-216-5]
• [Landscape ISBN 978-0-07-009780-3]
• [The Wise Silence ISBN 978-0-8212-1548-7]
• Sunflowers

External links

• Artcyclopedia, Paul Caponigro
• Amico Public Collection