John Paul Caponigro

Renowned photographer John Paul Caponigro has been studying and reinventing American desertscapes and seascapes through his art for twenty years. Trained as a painter, he often explores and manipulates color relationships found in nature. Caponigro is recognized as one of the world’s most knowledgeable and accomplished artist working with digital processes. His photographs have a magical, almost surreal quality about them, which forces viewers to reconsider their relationship to nature and to art.

How does your painting manifest itself in your photography? I look at my creative process very differently from a traditional photographer who’s been trained in the classical ways of making a photograph. Whereas I’m familiar with encountering a blank canvas, photographers like to frame their images through a viewfinder. Painters simply have to confront that void. They still have the same set of influences, but they do things differently. As a result, I would say that my process is more of a hybrid, and more dynamic. It makes it interesting for me to explore the process of creativity and realize that it’s not a static, fixed thing, and that the strategies and disciplines used in other practices can be repurposed.

So you’re not just capturing a moment? No, I would say that at least half of my images or more are composites of multiple moments. That forces you to think differently, and it’s that challenge to think outside of traditional boundaries that excites me most.

Do you think that growing up in the stark beauty of the New Mexican landscape helped to inform your focus on the natural world? I think the environment that an artist grows up in, or lives in at any given time, has a profound impact on his work. Having spent an equal amount of time in New Mexico and Maine now, I don’t think it’s a mistake that half of my work is seascapes and the other half is desert. What they have in common is that I relate to both of them as spare spaces with big, open skies. But, largely, I look at them both as wasteland. The notion of a desert is present even in the seascapes. So they look pretty, but there’s kind of a quiet subtext.

I think also some of this comes from the influence of my father, who’s a landscape photographer (Paul Caponigro), and other photographers that I’ve had encounters with, particularly Eliot Porter. I remember one of the critical conversations I had with him when I was a teenager. We were both very concerned about environmental issues, and we had this long conversation one evening, and he kind of summed it all up. He said, “Well, ya know, the two largest issues facing your generation are going to be desertification and overpopulation, and it’ll be your generation that comes to terms with handing on habitable environment to future generations.” [laughs] He dropped a load on me, ya know, but it had a profound impact. I don’t think it’s a mistake that I’m making pictures of unpeopled wastelands.

"Quiet Ululation," part of Caponigro's Allies series (shown here in black and white).

Do you see any discord in the fact that you take very natural, earthy landscapes and alter them digitally? I’m trying to bridge both sensibilities to find, even in what appear to be straighter images or less altered images, a kind of a quiet, magic realism in those moments. I think in that respect they connect to the more surreal, grander statements that are more obvious. I see it along a spectrum; all of it has a kind of magical quality to it, an otherworldly quality. In some cases it’s quite understated, though once in a while it might even be overstated. [laughs] I’m trying to suggest that there’s a life and a spirit in places where we don’t often see them, and that we bring a lot to the environment. I’m really hoping that each photo causes viewers to pause, that they reconsider what they’re looking at and hopefully how they’re looking at it. Hopefully they realize that in many cases they don’t have enough information to even know whether the image has been altered, which is true with any photograph you look at. You look at context, you look at the testimony of the person making the document, but most importantly the viewer has to realize what he’s bringing to the picture. That ambiguity is deliberate. That’s why I create things that are “straight,” but they look altered, and altered things that look unaltered.

Even in some of the most dramatically colored photographs, it’s hard to tell whether you’ve altered the colors and to what degree. Could you comment on your use of color? I probably use color as a painter. In that regard, I’m not solely concerned with reproducing the color relationships that are out in the world as the camera or the film captures them. Certainly there is a desire to reproduce beautiful relationships I find out in nature, but there’s more than that. There’s an emotional content, and a sensual content to color. It’s something that you see explored with more refinement in the world of painting, and I’m really glad I have that training. In art, you often have to translate things, because so much is lost—three-dimensionality, time, any number of things—when you take something from the world and put it on a canvas. There are times when I find that there’s far too much in a photograph. Very often, the image is better when things are taken out or left behind. When a painter encounters a scene, he doesn’t just paint everything. It’s hard to do that with a camera, which records everything. Sometimes that’s too much, sometimes you want to focus on just a few essentials that have an extraordinary relationship with one another, and you don’t want all the other details to get in the way of appreciating that.

Which of your works do you think has taught you the most about yourself? One of the signature images that I always come back to is called “Avra.” It’s a symmetrical blue cloud over a waterscape, and I’ve had probably more stories of what people see in those patterns than any other. A lot of people have associated it with breath, which is a confirmation for me, because avra is the Sanskrit word for breath. It’s an image that continues to stick with me, and it remains today as vital as it was when I created it over ten years ago.

I also think that it was an important image in that it wasn’t pre-planned. It happened by accident. I was moving a mirror across a light table and saw the reflection out of the corner of my eye, and I realized that what was happening there was far better than what I was chasing. It was kind of a breakthrough moment that got me to focus on my relationship with the formal device of symmetry. For me personally, the most important images are the ones that bring an insight, some sort of breakthrough, and shift the way that I see things.

Was it ever hard being the son of [famed photographer] Paul Caponigro? It has its challenges, its pros and cons. Being measured by somebody else’s standards is not always easy. By the same token, I was raised in a very rich environment and my parents have been very supportive. Mom [Eleanor] is a painter, Dad’s a photographer, and they’ve both been tremendously influential, so I’m not sure that I would be here otherwise. Because they helped me acquire so much craft and insight, I respect them both tremendously. We’re shaped by our environment, and part of that environment is the family.

I didn’t know your mother was a painter. Yeah, many people don’t realize how influential she’s been. She really kind of put painting aside decades ago and became a graphic designer, where she oversaw the production of many famous fine art photographic books. So I got to see a parade of photographers coming into her studio while she was helping them put together their books. She’s been equally influential, and many people don’t know it, because she doesn’t enjoy the same kind of notoriety [as his father].

So you truly are the product of your parents in many ways. Yeah. I’ve come to terms with my own sensibility, but I’m very similar in many ways, and I realize that I’ve been handed a tremendous legacy.

To respond to this article, e-mail editorial@artvoice.com or write to: Artvoice, 810 Main St., Buffalo, NY 14202