Paul Caponigro

(b Boston, MA, 7 Dec 1932). American photographer. He studied music at Boston University College of Music (1950-51). In 1953 and again in 1956, when he also studied with Alfred W. Richter, Caponigro studied photography with Benjamin Chin, former student of Ansel Adams and Minor White at the California School of Fine Art. From 1957 to 1959 he was associated with Minor White, first as a student in Rochester, New York, at workshops in White's home and then as an assistant during the summers of 1958 and 1959. His association with White provided the basis for his mature style. A delicate tonal balance and mystical view of nature typify black and white images such as Running White Deer, County Wicklow, Ireland (1967; see Landscape: Photographs by Paul Caponigro, New York, 1975, no. 27). Throughout his career he repeatedly returned to the examination of particular forms in nature. Close-up views of sunflowers constitute one series (Sunflower, New York, 1974); another is devoted to the ancient stone monuments of England and Ireland, for example Ardara Dolmen, County Donegal, Ireland (1967; New York, MOMA, see Szarkowski, p. 193) and the later portfolio Stonehenge (Santa Fe, 1978).

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Caponigro, Paul (b. 1932), American photographer who became a classical pianist before studying photography in San Francisco, and with Minor White at the Rochester Institute of Technology. His subtly toned, evocative black-and-white images of brooding landscapes, stone chapels, and ruins in Europe, and the prehistoric megaliths of Britain and Ireland, are in the straight-photography tradition of White and Edward Weston. His cloud pictures are as powerful as Stieglitz's ‘equivalents’.

— Tim Troy

Bibliography

• Caponigro, P., Meditations in Light (1996)

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