About Paul Caponigro

Paul’s artistic drive is led by discovery and openness to the creative process. Paul began piano lessons at age 12 and picked up a camera at 13. His love of both remains intertwined. Paul attended the College of Music at Boston University but preferred private lessons. He worked in a commercial photography studio but deepened his photography while serving at the Presidio in San Francisco in the early 1950s. Discovering Morris Graves paintings blending abstraction, realism, and mysticism led Paul to commit to honing his own vision.

Paul’s piano teacher taught him an appreciation for tone, sound, and well-played phrases. This led to placing a value on the detail within the whole and taught Paul to tune into the power intuition and feeling. In his piano teacher’s dying days, he told Paul that music should come from the heart. Paul’s emphasis on the experience, rather than technical accuracy, encourages a quietness and stillness to emerge.

Minor White and Ansel Adams were among Paul’s teachers. In short order, those masters of photography became his friends and he joined their ranks in his own right. Paul drew on White’s proselytization for the spiritual, and Adam’s call for technical skills to have a rich set of photographic tools with which to craft an image. Paul’s mastery of the medium gave him the philosophical edge and technical skills to create a unique style that calls the mysteries of the universe to the fore and become visible in his photographs. 

Paul has traveled across the Unites States, Britain, Europe, and Japan photographing small details and vast landscapes. While one might see the underpinnings of modernist photography, it is subdued by Paul’s focus on atmosphere and unique framing that often gives life to sacred places or finds the sacred in the ordinary.