As a boy, Paul Caponigro was obsessed with the little Brownie camera his grandmother used to take photographs of the family. He once said in an interview that he was just 12 years old when he used pocket money to buy his own.
But the camera wasn’t enough.
“He got very disappointed by the little prints that came back from the corner drugstore,” said his son, John Paul Caponigro. “Then he saw some other photographs that were really lively, luminous, and he needed to figure out how to make his own prints. He saw very early that, while you could frame something, making a beautiful print of it was its own art and craft.
His first darkroom was in the basement of his family home in Boston when he was still just a kid. His last was in his home in the woods in Cushing.
Paul Caponigro died Nov. 10 of congestive heart failure at 91. He became known as one of America’s foremost landscape photographers and an expert in the traditional silver gelatin process he used to create his black-and-white images.
“He is still known today really as one of the masters of analog photography, and he stayed true to it over the years,” said Kari Wehrs, photography program chair at Maine Media Workshops + College in Rockport, where Caponigro taught one of the first classes 50 years ago.
Paul Caponigro and Ansel Adams used to sit at the dinner table and argue about classical music composers. (Paul Caponigro would usually make the case that Chopin was the best, while Adams defended Mozart.)
His first love, even before photography, was music. Caponigro was born in 1932 and grew up in Boston. His uncle played piano professionally, and Caponigro told his son about how he would beeline for the bench when the family visited the man at home.
“He wouldn’t even say hello,” John Paul Caponigro, 59, said. “He would just sit down and wait until Jimmy started playing.”
Caponigro’s father decided that his children would all play a different instrument, and he at first dictated that Caponigro would play the accordion, while his sister would play the piano. He brought his young son to pick out her instrument, not knowing that she would quickly give it up while her brother waited patiently to take her place at the keys. He later studied at the Boston University College of Music before he made his career in photography.
The piano and the camera were dual passions throughout his life.
“Both of them said, ‘You have to play with us, think about us, work with us,’” Caponigro said in an interview he and his son did as part of a video series for the printing company for Epson America in 2019. “And I did both. While the prints are washing in the darkroom, I’m upstairs practicing the piano.
Caponigro became known for the spiritual quality of his work. His subjects include the megalithic monuments of the British Isles, Scotland and Ireland, the temples and sacred gardens of Japan, and the woodlands of New England.
His first solo exhibition was at the George Eastman Museum in 1958 and went on to be exhibited internationally. Today, his work is in the collections of such institutions as the Museum of Modern Art in New York, the Smithsonian America Art Museum in Washington, D.C., and the Getty Museum in Los Angeles.
He received two Guggenheim Fellowships and three National Endowment for the Arts grants. He consulted with the Polaroid Corporation. He was awarded numerous honors during his career and was inducted into the International Photography Hall of Fame this year.
His son said Paul Caponigro lived “by lifting his finger and feeling the wind.” He did not plan his work and preferred to be spontaneous. He didn’t keep a particularly regular schedule. He was rigorous about his process in the darkroom. He did not make a print once and then pack it away. He tried new variations and stayed open to new ideas. He fostered a deep interest in spirituality and endeavored to live simply.
“Like a musician might have practiced so that he knows all his scales, he knows the progressions, he got all that,” John Paul Caponigro said. “But today’s another day. What’s going to happen today? And I think that kept him alive to the process and creating a lively object.”
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