In 1967, when the renowned landscape photographer Paul Caponigro was living in Dublin, he learned about a herd of white deer in nearby County Wicklow. Intrigued, he asked a man who worked on a large estate there if he could get his dog to chase the deer in and out of a forest.
The late-day Irish light was failing as Mr. Caponigro waited patiently for the deer to show up.
“I thought, ‘Well, the deer are just going to disperse,’” he said in an online video interview with Epson America in 2019. “One deer took the lead, and they all followed. I thought, ‘Unbelievable.’”
He had time to capture them in only one shot, using his large-format Deardorff camera.
The resulting black-and-white photograph shows some two dozen deer in a mesmerizing blur — indistinct, eerie white figures under a canopy of trees.
“Skittish and ghostly on delicate pale legs,” the photographer Amy Miller wrote on Medium in 2016 for a “Photos We Love” feature. “A fleeting moment perhaps in a dream.”
Mr. Caponigro’s son, John Paul, a visual artist and writer, said in an email that his father “would have shot it sharp if he could have,” adding: “The blur is one of those happy accidents. Even when he developed the negative, he wasn’t sure it worked until he printed it.”
His father, he said, “always described it as a gift from the fairies.”
In a career of more than 70 years, “Running White Deer” was Mr. Caponigro’s most celebrated photograph. The visual artist Thaddeus Holownia, interviewed by The Telegraph-Journal of New Brunswick, Canada, praised its “great, great artwork — mystery, romance and the bridging of the abstract and concrete worlds.”
“Running White Deer” is one of many elegant, inventive, weird and surreal photos that show Mr. Caponigro’s enduring love of nature and his use of natural light, shadow, backlighting and double exposure.
“I knew that the forces of nature were a language, was a way of life, could inform you,” Mr. Caponigro said in an oral history interview for the Smithsonian Archives of American Art, in 2012. “In other words, nature really was my teacher right from the beginning.”
He photographed Stonehenge and other megalithic monuments; many sunflowers, including one that is backlit and looks as if it has an aura: a Red Delicious apple whose white spots sparkle like a galaxy of stars against a dark background; two leaves floating and connected by an umbilical cord; many still lifes; and the surf-pounded sandstone shore at Cape Kiwanda, Ore., which appears to be a Hollywood scenic designer’s idea of sharply contoured desert dunes.
Mr. Caponigro died on Nov. 10 at his home in Cushing, Maine, on the same property where his son lives. He was 91. John Paul Caponigro said the cause was congestive heart failure.
Paul John Jerome Caponigro was born on Dec. 7, 1932, in Boston. His father, George Caponigro, was an Italian immigrant whose many jobs included floorer and mushroom farmer. His mother, Mary (Cultrera) Caponigro, who was from Sicily, managed the home.
Photography and music were an indelible part of Paul’s childhood. His Uncle Jimmy was a pianist who performed in bars, and when Paul was as young as 3 years old he loved to listen to Jimmy play. Soon, Paul began taking lessons. When he was about 12, fascinated by the Brownie box camera his maternal grandmother used to take family photos, he bought his own camera and set up a darkroom in the basement.
“So I had music and photography,” he told Epson America. “Both of them said, ‘You have to play with us. Think about us. Work with us.’ And I did both.”
School did not interest him. He couldn’t wait for the bell that dismissed class every day. “I would head out, not go home but go straight to the ocean, which was very close by, or the woods,” he said in the oral history interview, “and hang out there, and listen to the birds and watch the waves come in, and pick up shells.”
He entered the Boston University College of Music hoping to become a concert pianist, but left after a year to pursue photography (although he continued to play classical music on the piano for the rest of his life). He worked for a photo studio until he was drafted into the Army, near the end of the Korean War, and was assigned to the Presidio in San Francisco.
While working at the base’s photo studio, he met the photographer Benjamen Chinn, a civilian employee. Several months after they met, Mr. Chinn took Mr. Caponigro to a party at the landscape photographer Ansel Adams’s house. He was ushered into Mr. Adams’s studio, filled with prints of his photographs of mountains, the moon rising and Yosemite Falls.
Mr. Caponigro recalled his reaction in the oral history interview: “Entranced. I was absolutely stunned.”
He also met Minor White, an influential photographer, editor and critic, and Dorothea Lange, whose evocative images captured the desperation of Dust Bowl refugees in the 1930s.
After he was discharged from the Army in 1955, Mr. Caponigro worked in the darkroom of an advertising agency and later spent time as a student of Mr. White’s at the Rochester Institute of Technology. By then, he had begun his freelance career: He was a consultant for Polaroid, did architectural photography, taught at workshops and at Boston University, and published numerous books, including “Sunflower” (1985), “Megaliths” (1986) and “The Voice of the Print” (1994).
He received Guggenheim fellowships in 1966 and 1975.
Mr. Caponigro was not part of the commercial world of major magazines like Life and Look, where photographers often became brand names. “He preferred to live a more quiet life, spend more time living in nature and make his work,” his son said. “He didn’t put himself out there as much as he could have.”
Mr. Caponigro’s photos have nonetheless 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.
Shannon Perich, a photography curator at the Smithsonian’s National Museum of American History, said that Mr. Caponigro “didn’t put himself in a position to be popular. Paul didn’t seek legacy; he sought the creative practice of photography.”
Mr. Caponigro developed his own photographs throughout his career and rarely veered from expressing his spiritual vision in black and white.
“How do you put feeling into chemistry and silver emulsions?” he said in the Epson America interview. “The black and white pulls it just far enough away from the literal, so-called real world, to begin to inject a little more emotion or psychological activity.”
In addition to his son, Mr. Caponigro is survived by a granddaughter. His marriage to Eleanor Morris ended in divorce in 1976, but they remained close; she designed many of his books and exhibitions during and after their marriage.
In 1958, Mr. Caponigro came upon a rock wall in West Hartford, Conn., with a series of jagged surfaces. It looked like an abstract masterpiece, but was part of a roadwork construction site.
“The textures, shapes and lighting in this photograph suggest that it might be a painting rather than a photographic record of the basalt wall,” he wrote in his book “Visual Memories and Hidden Places” (2023), “and in fact some viewers, upon seeing the photo, relate the image to the painting by Marcel Duchamp known as ‘Nude Descending a Staircase.’”
He added, “The painting and my photo reveal very similar forms and shapes, but of course I prefer looking at my own photograph to observe the wonder and play that can be found in nature’s whimsical ways.”
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