Top 51 Quotes & Sayings by John Paul Caponigro

Explore popular quotes and sayings by a photographer John Paul Caponigro.
Last updated on December 21, 2024.
John Paul Caponigro

John Paul Caponigro is an Environmental Fine Art Landscape Photographer. He is the son of the American photographer Paul Caponigro and Eleanor Caponigro a graphic designer. John Paul attended Yale University, and the University of California, Santa Cruz where he was trained as a painter and later as a photographer. After college John moved to Maine and became an artist in residence at The Center for Creative Imaging. John now works with photo-based digital imaging as his primary medium. Dan Steinhardt of Epson considers John Paul "...one of the great mentors of the photographic medium". The American photographer Joyce Tenneson has said, "John Paul Caponigro is the rare combination of gifted artist and master technician. He works from the heart to create images that are poetic and evocative, and at times, mystical. He is someone whose sensitivity and intelligence work to break new ground, and someone I will enjoy watching in the years to come.". He has been awarded membership into many photographic organizations including the Photoshop Hall of Fame, the Epson Stylus Pros, Xrite Coloratti, and the Canon Explorers of Light. His work crosses the lines between photography and painting and displays knowledge of painterly composition and color theory, coupled with content of modern science, psychology, primal cultures, and the environment. The photographer Arnold Newman stated,"...Caponigro's mysterious and magical images go beyond reality or surrealism. He has created a wonderful new world of his own". John Paul Caponigro lives in Cushing, Maine with his photographer wife Arduina, and their son.

Photographer | Born: June 23, 1965
The best plans evolve.
The primary mode of experiencing images is non-verbal... but once it's brought out into the light of the day, what's understood by the subconscious intuitive mind can be better grasped by the conscious rational mind. Aligning the two produces powerful results.
To be sure, not all moments are equally fleeting. Some moments last longer than others. And certain events do reoccur more than once and even recur repeatedly. Sometimes you do get more than one chance. Sometimes you don't. It helps to know how long a window of opportunity you have and if you'll get another chance.
A photograph is an invitation to look - and to look at looking. — © John Paul Caponigro
A photograph is an invitation to look - and to look at looking.
I'd say seeking is one of the fundamental artistic impulses. Art is about discovery. The medium is not the message.
How do we know what we know? Is seeing believing? Is believing seeing?
Don't ask 'Should I ...?'. Instead, 'Ask what happens if I ...?'
Many times we are tempted to defer to the documents we create, rather than the direct experiences we have.
Looking and seeing are two different things.
It takes asking many questions from many perspectives to truly understand something.
The frame frames a frame of mind.
It's important that we regularly reconsider, revise, and expand our practices, as our capabilities and needs evolve, both to strengthen our understanding of them and to promote our awareness of new practices and their conscientious uses.
Images are altered in many ways, to many degrees, and for many reasons, so it's important for viewers to be informed of both.
We talk about the vulnerability involved in sharing our work publicly. I don't think we talk enough about the real vulnerability involved in making art; if we truly engage the process we are changed by it.
Surprisingly, Gestalt psychologists have found that when subjected to Ganz fields for long periods of time, we hallucinate. Can empty fields serve as mirrors, not for our exteriors, but for our interiors?
Education, or enrichment, is a dynamic, evolving, lifelong process. Every time you look, sensitively with awareness, your vision grows. — © John Paul Caponigro
Education, or enrichment, is a dynamic, evolving, lifelong process. Every time you look, sensitively with awareness, your vision grows.
Listen carefully. The way(s) we speak about things is revealing.
The act of creation, making anything, is an alteration. We cannot eliminate the medium or ourselves from the process, and both are limited. We create decisive moments by devoting our time and attention to specific things. This is the greatest gift we can give anyone or anything - pieces of our life.
It's one thing to make a beautiful thing; it's another thing to make a living thing.
My mantra is, 'This or something better.'
Photography is much more about elimination than inclusion. The images we make with a lens typically eliminate ninety percent of our field of view and everything that is out of our field of view. The shutter slices time, eliminating all moments before and after it opens and closes. Three dimensions are reduced to two. And in some cases color is removed. How can we call these kinds of artifacts unaltered?
Every photograph is altered, to one degree or another.
We're responsible for everything that's included in the frame. We're also responsible for what's not included in the frame. We're responsible for the way we frame the world.
The most important question is, 'Am I asking the most important question?' The second most important question is, 'Am I asking the most important question in the most important way?'
Less information often leads to more interpretation.
We are the strongest filter we can place before the lens. We point the lens both outward and inward.
Amid countless everyday miracles, I come in contact with something greater than myself and realize I am a part of it... I move in wonder through inspiration, reverence, gratitude, interconnectedness, transcendence, and grace.
Mysterious spaces cause us to turn inward. Amid a rich upwelling of association, we encounter many aspects of ourselves. As we grow still, we come in contact with a unified, empty, yet full ground of our being. As our consciousness grows more spacious, we find connections between us and the wider world, a shared greater reality.
With the arrival of the new comes the need to overcome fascination with novelty in order to approach substance and sophistication - a sophistication born of subtlety and depth of perception, not complexity and perceived virtuosity.
A good question has many answers.
Different people can photograph the same things with the same tools and create such different images.
Color is a powerful physical, biological, and psychological force. When less color and less intense color is present, trace amounts and subtle differences become highly significant and are strongly felt.
Color is a powerful physical, biological, and psychological force.
All photographs are about light. The great majority of photographs record light as a way of describing objects in space. A few photographs are less about objects and more about the space that contains them. Still fewer photographs are about light itself.
We don't have enough words for photography. Can you imagine writers having only one word for writing? — © John Paul Caponigro
We don't have enough words for photography. Can you imagine writers having only one word for writing?
Art is a journey of discovery.
What we see changes what we know. What we know changes what we see. Perception, belief, action, and change are codependent.
Surfaces reveal so much. The marks painters make reveal so much about their work and themselves; their sense of proportion, line, and rhythm is more telling than their signature. Looking at the surfaces of nature may offer equivalent revelations. What do these shapes and patterns reveal about the world and their creator? Surfaces hide so much.
Surfaces simultaneously reveal and conceal.
Inquiry is more important than answers, for it is the questions we ask and the way in which we ask them that defines us.
Through the experience of art, the powers of perception and transformation can be awakened, in both those who create it and those who re-perceive it.
Visual artists choreograph dances for the eyes, guiding visual journeys in specific ways. But when presented with little or nothing, the journeys of the eyes become erratic and finally still their restless searching. The eye and mind and heart grow quiet, come to rest, and begin to understand their own functioning more deeply.
Photography extends our perception allowing us to see and experience more - second hand.
Photographs are never records of the way things are; they're records of the way things were.
Above all, remember that the computer simply isn't as intelligent as you are.
While many conclusions are drawn... the process of asking questions is more important than the answers... an ongoing process of discovery.
Seeing creates growth. — © John Paul Caponigro
Seeing creates growth.
We see the world through our experience.
The computer is a tool akin to a telescope or a microscope; a tool that opens vast frontiers of possibilities and brings them to light; a tool that captures the elemental and animates or holds it still at will; a tool that captures the organic flow of the earth's crust or the wash of a wave, and creates an impossible symmetry, an elemental Rorshach pattern ripe for continued exploration, divulging a thousand revelations.
Very often there is too little information in photographs to deduce how they were made and even what they represent. We rely on context and supplemental information to confirm our observations, not simply the documents themselves.
Many oriental cultures make a distinction between two ways of looking - 'hard eyes' and 'soft eyes'. When we look with hard eyes, we see specific details with sharp focus, but we don't see the relationships between different details as well. When we look with soft eyes we see the relationships between everything in our field of vision, but with this softer focus, we don't see all the details as clearly. It's possible to look in two ways at once.
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