Paul Caponigro
Paul Caponigro | Hass Gallery, Maine Media College | Rockport, Maine | ww.mainemedia.edu | Through November 30, 2025
In conjunction with posthumously naming photographer Paul Caponigro (1932-2024) its 2025 Visionary Award recipient, the Maine Media College has organized a show of around twenty of his photographs, most of them gelatin silver prints, dating from 1958 to 2008. The award and show celebrate Caponigro’s profound impact on the field of photography as well as his contributions to the growth of the college where he taught for many years.
The exhibition includes a number of Caponigro’s most celebrated images, including Running White Deer, 1967, taken during a stay at a private estate in Ireland. Hidden behind a stand of trees, he managed to capture the herd of wraithlike fallow deer dashing past. The photograph epitomizes his passion for evoking mystical elements of nature.
Whether standing among the silcrete rocks at Stonehenge, studying beach erosion in Revere, Massachusetts, or watching a wave break along the shoreline of Montauk, New York, Caponigro revealed the beauty and spirit of the place. Describing the circumstances of his photograph of a stand of trees alongside a Kentucky highway, he credited a dream for leading him to this “world in between.”
Caponigro’s still lifes stand among the most acclaimed of the genre. Half the show is devoted to these prizes: apples, pears, fungus on a marble table, a moth in a bowl. Each exquisitely composed arrangement is imbued with a particular luminosity—and, in the case of the apples, whole galaxies.
“It was my task to figure out…how to put feeling into chemistry and silver emulsions,” Caponigro states in a video portrait of him and his son, digital photographer John Paul Caponigro. At the same time, as he explained in a 2012 interview with Rebecca Falzano, he realized he had to be “in a state of love at all times.” Caponigro managed to put feeling and love into everything he did, including the classical piano he played his entire life.
Also on display are Caponigro’s large-format Deardorff view camera and Imogen Cunningham’s 1973 portrait of the artist. Cunningham’s photograph shows a handsome dark-haired man in plaid shirt looking at us with confidence, at once at ease and in touch with the world.
–Carl Little