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Remembering Paul Caponigro
26 November 2024
Paul Caponigro died of congestive heart failure on Nov. 10 at his home in Cushing, Maine. He was 91.
A native of Boston, his father immigrated from Italy, working as a floorer and mushroom farmer, among other jobs, while his Sicilian mother managed the house.
Caponigro's uncle was a pianist whose music captured the young boy's imagination. He would play classical piano throughout his life.
His fascination with photography was ignited by his maternal grandmother, who used a Brownie to take family photos. When he was 12, he bought his own camera and set up a darkroom in the basement.
He attended Boston University's College of Music with the intention of becoming a concert pianist. But after a year, he abandoned that plan to pursue photography.
After working for a photo studio, he was drafted into the Army at the end of Korean War and assigned to the Presidio in San Francisco where he worked in the base's photo studio.
It wasn't long before he fell in among the city's photographic crowd, which included Ansel Adams, Minor White and Dorothea Lange.
He followed White as his student to Rochester's Institute of Technology after he was discharged from the Army. There he began his freelance career. He was a consultant for Polaroid, shot architectural photography, taught at workshops and at Boston University and published books, including Sunflower (1985), Megaliths (1986) and The Voice of the Print (1994).
His photographs have been widely exhibited and are in the collections of the Museum of Modern Art, the Getty Museum, the Los Angeles County Museum of Art and the Smithsonian American Art Museum.
His marriage to Eleanor Morris ended in divorce in 1976. She designed many of his books and exhibitions during and after their marriage. They had a son John Paul Caponigro, who himself is an established photographer and survives him along with a granddaughter.
In 2013, he collaborated with his son on The Caponigro Father-Son Print Offer for The Online Photographer.
His son posted on his site the 9:36 video embedded above featuring his father.