The Mystery of Stillness: Photographs by Paul Caponigro
This exhibition presents nearly fifty silver gelatin prints by one of America’s most renowned landscape photographers, Paul Caponigro, whose work is featured in many major museum collections. He has received two Guggenheim fellowships and three grants from the National Endowment for the Arts.
Although Caponigro was influenced by the older generation of West Coast photographers, including Ansel Adams and Edward Weston, it was Minor White who was his true mentor. White explored the photograph’s potential for metaphor, meaning and expressing a spiritual state. Like White, Caponigro’s photographs evoke mood and feelings. “I want to get at another aspect of experiencing, to see beyond the image, behind appearance,” Caponigro described. “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.”
Caponigro’s contemplative works include a range of intriguing subjects: New England woods, Celtic megaliths in Ireland, Japanese temples and zen gardens and still lifes. Primarily created in the late 1950s through the 1970s, these photographs were drawn from the collections of the Fort Wayne Museum of Art, Indiana Wesleyan University in Marion, Indiana, and private collections.