The Online Photographer

This is the last hour of our current Paul and John Paul Caponigro Print Sale.

The sale ends at 5 p.m. New York time—that's 10 p.m. in London, and 7 a.m. Tuesday morning in Tokyo. John Paul will extend it a little bit for West Coasters (and Aussies in Perth).

Otherwise this really is the last chance for this work, as the father/son print pair was created for this sale and will be retired permanently when the sale ends...it won't be offered again under any circumstances for any price. It's a great piece—you will love it when you see it.

The first six prints have already shipped. The rest will go out by mid-week. Most people will get theirs in plenty of time for Christmas.

A bit of news: this print, like the last father-son print pairing we featured, has been accepted for the permanent collection of the Smithsonian Institution.

Buyers of the print will receive a free copy of the e-book Two Generations, which is a nice sampling of the work of both of them.

Revivalist
Personally, I think it's high time for a Paul Caponigro revival. Paul is 82, and has been a major American landscape and still life photographer since the 1960s. He's never fallen into obscurity, never been ignored; he's still well known, and his work still sells well. At the same time, he's not as well known as some other photographers of his generation and level of accomplishment, and almost none of his many books are in print...which is a shame as his medium has been the book as much as the fine print. He really deserves an Indian Summer, a bloom of appreciation for his wonderful career and superlative work.

He's been one of the most important photographers for me for most of my life. Here are a few words I wrote about Paul many years ago:

It is easy enough to mistake Caponigro for a mere landscapist; but it would be about as accurate as categorizing Diane Arbus as a portraitist, or Emmet Gowin as a maker of family snapshots. Caponigro is a spiritualist, a seeker, a mystic.

In general, the old saw about photographers wanting to show the substance beneath their subject, the soul of the machine, is nothing but a conceit—photographs are concerned with surface, not with substance, and they are infinitely better at showing how things look as opposed to how they are. But every one of us has had the experience of being in a place and suddenly having the hackles on the back of the neck stand up, as if an extraordinary insight had angled in upon us, or a ghost had flitted past. Paul Caponigro has managed to make a career of showing us those moments in photographs—and not by relying on symbolic shorthand, tricks, or gimmicks, either, which makes his accomplishment all the more remarkable. Somehow, by picking his spots with extreme care and fanatically eking the greatest descriptiveness possible out of the medium’s materials, he manages to compress those moments, those insights, into a square of gray. Many nature photographers please us by showing us nature as we might relate to her; Caponigro elicits awe by suggesting a nature entirely independent of us. [His work is] not about the world of appearances, but of the Spiritus Mundi that exists outside of time.

Here's a link to a great conversation between Paul and John Paul—there are lots of insights in it, both about them, and for you and your own work.

If you purchased one of these prints, thank you. Remember to give it time; Caponigro photographs never grab you by the shirtfront, but reveal themselves slowly across time and through repeated, renewed contemplation.

Mike

Original contents copyright 2014 by Michael C. Johnston and/or the bylined author. All Rights Reserved. Links in this post may be to our affiliates; sales through affiliate links may benefit this site.

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Fer: "That conversation you linked to made my day. Thanks."