Imagine being a 19-year-old aspiring photographer drafted into the US Army near the end of the Korean War. Imagine you’re stationed at the Presidio in San Francisco where you befriend a civilian photographer who asks if you want to go to a party. Now imagine going to the party and discovering the host is Ansel Adams.
“There was a going-away party,” explains Paul Capinegro in an oral history interview with the Smithsonian Institution. It was for another titan of American photography, Minor White. “And I was introduced to all of them – Bert Westin, Imogen Cunningham. Dorothea Lange was there. Oliver Gagliani… And two or three other well-known photographers were there as well.”
So began the photography career of Paul Capinegro.
Born and raised in Boston, Capinegro found footing in a West Coast scene more immersed in the natural and spiritual worlds than what was found back east.
“I was already sensitive to energies and forces,” Capinegro explains in the oral history interview. “I already had a kind of mystical approach to life. I was already reading books on spirituality and mysticism… So I had that groundwork.”
His most famous photograph, “Running White Deer,” captures the intent and spirit Capinegro looked to imbue in work. This image encapsulates Caponigro’s approach: patient observation, openness to serendipity and chance, and the ability to capture the magic of unexpected moments.
He took it early one evening in 1967 in County Wicklow, Ireland. Capinegro had heard about the white deer in the area and convinced a local estate worker to help him photograph them by having his dog herd the deer through the forest. As the light faded, he waited with his large-format Deardorff camera.
Then, bounding from the woods came the herd. The photograph captures the animals as ethereal forms against a backdrop of shadowed woods.
“Irish light is rather soft,” Capinegro explained in a video profile with Epson America. “It was toward the end of the day so I was not able to get enough exposure to use a speed that would stop the action of the deer. So that’s why the deer are moving and it turned out to be quite a magical image.”
The blurring of the deer transformed what might have been a simple nature photograph into something mystical, bridging the physical and spiritual worlds he spent his life exploring.
When Caponigro passed away in November 2024 at age 91, he left behind a body of work that demonstrates not just mastery of his craft, but a spiritual connection to the natural world that sets him apart from his contemporaries.
Born in Boston in 1932 to Italian immigrant parents, Caponigro’s early art emerged through dual passions: photography and music. His Uncle Jimmy, a pianist who performed in bars and later studied at the New England Conservatory, introduced young Paul to classical music. He later entered Boston University College of Music hoping to become a concert pianist. Meanwhile, his grandmother’s Brownie box camera sparked another fascination. By age twelve, he had a camera of his own and set up a darkroom in the family basement.
School held little interest for the young artist. “I would head out, not go home but go straight to the ocean, which was very close by, or the woods,” he recalled in the Smithsonian Interview. “I’d hang out there, and listen to the birds, and watch the waves come in, and pick up shells.” This early communion with nature defined his art for the next seven decades.
Despite his admiration for the West Coast school of photography, Caponigro forged his own path. While Adams captured nature’s grandiosity with technical perfection, Caponigro pursued something more elusive. “I knew that the forces of nature were a language, a way of life that could inform you,” he explained. “Nature really was my teacher right from the beginning.”
This belief led him to photograph what he considered the spiritual essence he perceived within landscapes. His work with megalithic monuments in Ireland and England, particularly his studies of Stonehenge, reveal ancient stones as more than archaeological subjects. “Teachings from the ancient fathers,” he called them.
“The stones spoke to me,” he said, suggesting that these sites held wisdom that could be accessed through patient observation and photography. “And I spent time with them. And I didn’t just go click, click, click. I would spend hours just sitting with them, looking at them, walking around them, touching them… And then when I felt I understood what they were about, then I would photograph.”
Caponigro’s technical approach matched his spiritual one. While he mastered the Zone System developed by Adams, he adapted it to serve his own vision.
“How do you put feeling into chemistry and silver emulsions?” he once asked.
His answer was to use black and white photography to move away from literal representation and allow “a little more emotion or psychological activity” to emerge.
He insisted on printing his own work, believing that the darkroom process was as much a spiritual practice as the act of photographing.
His subjects ranged from grand landscapes to intimate natural details. A backlit sunflower becomes transcendent. A Red Delicious apple, photographed against darkness, reveals spots that sparkle like a galaxy of stars. Two leaves connected by what appears to be an umbilical cord suggest nature’s hidden relationships. His images invite viewers to see beyond the material to something more profound.
“I would walk until something stopped me.” He once said when describing his approach to photographing in nature. “And then I’d look to see what stopped me. What was the energy? What was speaking? What was showing itself?”
Unlike many of his contemporaries, Caponigro avoided the commercial world of magazine photography, preferring a quieter life closer to nature. He supported himself through teaching, workshops, and consulting work for Polaroid, while maintaining his artistic independence. His work found homes in major museums including the Museum of Modern Art, the Getty Museum, and the Smithsonian American Art Museum.
After living in various places including Santa Fe, New Mexico, Caponigro settled in Cushing, Maine, where he continued to work and teach until late in life. He maintained his darkroom practice and his piano playing, seeing both as essential parts of his artistic expression. His books, including “Sunflower” (1985), “Megaliths” (1986), and “The Voice of the Print” (1994), reveal an artist constantly seeking deeper connection with his subjects.
In his final years, Caponigro focused on finding profound meaning in immediate surroundings rather than seeking it in distant locations. He photographed dried flowers in his studio and the Maine landscape outside his door with the same reverence he had brought to Stonehenge decades earlier. His approach remained consistent: keep quiet and listen to what nature has to say.
Paul Caponigro’s legacy is more than his prints and influence on American photography. It’s in demonstrating that photography can be a form of communion with the natural world, a way of revealing the mysterious in the mundane.
“You should be receptive, and not demand an answer,” he once said when describing his approach. In our age of instant images and digital manipulation, his patient, spiritual approach to photography offers an alternative way of seeing and being in the world.
