Seeing With the Heart:
Paul & John Paul Caponigro:
Photographs 1953-2020
Paul and John Paul Caponigro, father and son, use photography as an expressive medium to explore the external natural world and their internal existential lives. Creative individuals have multiple forms of artistic endeavors. Paul plays piano and John Paul is also a poet and painter. These creative acts inform and contribute to their photographic practices.
Photo by Arnold Newman
John Paul & Paul Caponigro
Seeing With the Heart is a new traveling exhibition now available for circulation world wide beginning in the Fall of 2024. The exhibition is curated by Shannon Perich, Curator at the Smithsonian’s National Museum of American History and organized by Photographic Traveling Exhibitions, Los Angeles, CA.
Paul Caponigro
|
John Paul Caponigro |
Seeing With the Heart brings together two generations of photographers. The Caponigros offer their own words to deepen how we might understand their photographs, contemplate our place in the world, and how we see it. Featured in the exhibition are 80 works, 40 by each photographer.
The exhibition is comprised of three sections, Pairs, Paul Caponigro and John Paul Caponigro. In Pairs, six pairs of photographs are presented to set the stage. Paul is grounded in darkroom black and white photography that emerged after WWII. John Paul’s photographic work is facilitated by digital technologies that emerged at the end of the 20th century. Yet, they share similar themes exploring and contemplating the human experience in relationship to nature and spirituality. A single word on the section label offers visitors an entry point to compare and contrast the photographs. This opening helps visitor note their distinct creative practices and consider how each works with photographic tools and materials to visualize their ideas.
Paul Caponigro |
John Paul Caponigro
|
The remaining photographs are divided between each photographer with sections guided by their own voices. Paul Caponigro’s quotes about his practice and photography inform each group of his works along with a QR code providing an opportunity to hear his piano playing. John Paul Caponigro is a poet and painter. His poems serve as section labels providing a relationship between words and photographs. This approach gives visitors a direct line to the photographers' creative life deepening opportunities for visitors to reflect on the ways each makes extraordinary photographs that transport us through time mentally and emotionally.
Paul Caponigro |
John Paul Caponigro |
The close of the exhibition ask visitors, “What do you hold sacred and how do you find it?” This exhibition of photographs by Paul and John Paul Caponigro explores how other forms of creativity inform their photographic practices, and how they each bring their sense of nature and spirituality to their ideas about the human experience. Visitors are invited to reflect on their own lives with three more questions. What are your creative expressions? Which ones are most prominent and how do they inform the others? Where do you situate yourself between the natural world and your inner life? |
|
Photo by Ginette Vachon, 1987
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 of 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 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. Paul’s mastery of the medium gave him the philosophical edge and photographic prowess 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. The section of Paul Caponigro’s work is divided in to seven sections, Spirit, Heart, Light, Music, Terrain, Available, and Mystery. |
|
| Quotes by photographer Paul Caponigro |
“Photography is a medium, a language, through which I might come to experience directly, live more closely with, the interaction between myself and nature.” – Paul Caponigro
“I often see the materials of photography as being a type of terrain. Emulsions, liquid developers, silver salts, and fixers interact, and I construct a landscape that I need to first explore in my mind’s eye if I am to make it manifest as an artful image in silver.” – Paul Caponigro
“Photography’s potential as a great image-maker and communicator is really no different from the same potential in the best poetry where familiar, everyday words, placed within a special context, can soar above the intellect and touch subtle reality in a unique way.” – Paul Caponigro
“The key is to not let the camera, which depicts nature in so much detail, reveal just what the eye picks up, but what the heart picks up as well.” – Paul Caponigro
|
|
Photo by Seth Resnick
John Paul Caponigro
|
John Paul’s creative life has been fueled by a variety of dynamic influences.
His technical skills, philosophies, and artistic practices are derived from his parents’ histories, his own intellectual inquiry, professional relationships, and personal journey.
The New Mexico landscape demands attention to form and light, both are critical to John Paul’s images. His youth in New Mexico formed an understanding of the prehistorical and contemporary ways people and nature co-exist and influence each other. His meditations on human connectedness to nature and pointed accountability for its care deeply underpin his work.
His firsthand understanding of the history of photography is exceptional. Surrounded by conversations among his father’s influential photography friends and his mother’s work in color photography publishing, he was afforded the deepest of philosophical and technical photography discussions. Additionally, between 1995 and 2007, John Paul published 48 of his interviews with photographers in View Camera and Camera Arts.
John Paul’s capacity to help smooth the transition between analog and digital photography was possible because of his deep understanding of photographic practices and art making. His close collaboration with Adobe, Canon, Epson, and others facilitated a dynamic transition from analog to digital. In addition, he wrote the first instruction manual driven by visual principles, rather than software instruction, for digital photography in 2000, Adobe Photoshop Master Class. John Paul brings his distinctive vision and practice to others through workshops, lectures, publications, digital platforms, and exhibitions.
John Paul Caponigro Mission
My life’s work is dedicated to inspiring conscientious
creative interaction with our environment.
Authentic creativity is the key to unlocking solutions
for the most pressing issues of our times.
Each of us has unique and valuable contributions
to make during this critical era of rapid change.
I urge you to make yours now.
I’m here to help. |
|
____________________________________________________________________________ |
Curator, Shannon Thomas Perich |
| Shannon Thomas Perich has curated the Photographic History Collection (PHC) at the Smithsonian’s National Museum of American History for more than 27 years. The PHC’s long history of collecting for the medium, officially since 1896, makes it ideal repository to study the art, technology, and history of photography. Perich has curated many exhibitions, written and contributed to books and journals, taught at the Maryland Institute College of Art, lectured, and shaped a national collection through acquisitions. The transition from analog to digital photography is visible through her collecting efforts. Among those acquisitions are John Paul Caponigro’s digital darkroom, one of his iPhone cameras, and a wide array of digital and non-digital photographs. Paul Caponigro’s photographs were collected by previous curators in the 1960s. Perich continues to mine and grow the PHC to explore how we understand history through photographs and are shaped by photography. |
|
__________________________________________________________________________
- Introduction - List of Works- Contact - __________________________________________________________________________ |
Exhibition Facts
Seeing With the Heart
Contents:
80 prints framed to 16×20 and 28×36,
gelatin silver & pigmented ink prints
Video/Audio:
Video Interview with John and John Paul Caponigro
Hear Paul Caponigro playing piano.
Hear John Paul Caponigro reading his poetry.
Lectures:
John Paul is available
for on-site lectures and gallery talks
The Practice Of Photography – Past, Present,
Future Ekphrasis – Writing In Response To Art
Paul and John Paul
are available via Zoom
Father & Son
Space Req:
250-350 running feet approx
Loan Fee:
Upon request
Shipping & Insurance:
Exhibitor responsible
Requirements:
Appropriate security, environmental controls
Contact:
Tel: 310 397 3098 Email: info@p-t-e.org
|
|
