Paul Caponigro
[Photographer, b. 1932, Boston, Massachusetts, lives in Cushing, Maine.]
We always point the lens both outward and inward.
I don’t trust any camera you can’t make out of wood.
Photography is a medium, a language through which I might come to experience directly the interaction between myself and nature.
Work incessantly, cultivate discrimination, gather freedom from your own hard-earned results. Disregard successes but go back for help in an immediate problem. The possibility of discovery is everywhere. Freedom from your own work allows for intuition that draws from all your experience and perception but goes beyond it.
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.
Who can guarantee us anything for all the thinking and feeling? Who is such a total master that he’s going to get precisely what he expected?
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.
In my years of photography I have learned that many things can be sensed, seen, shaped, or resolved in a realm of quiet, well in advance of, or between, the actual clicking of shutters and the sloshing of films and papers in chemical solutions. I work to attain a “state of heart,” a gentle space offering inspirational substance that could purify one’s vision. Photography, like music, must be born in the unmanifest world of the spirit.
