Paul Caponigro Quotes

• It's one thing to make a picture of what a person looks like, it's another thing to make a portrait of who they are.

  Paul Caponigro

  Inspirational, Photography, Portraits

  51 Copy quote

• The key is to not let the camera, which depicts nature in so much detail, reveal just what the eye picks up, but what the heart picks up as well.

  Paul Caponigro

  Heart, Eye, Keys

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• Photography is a medium, a language, through which I might come to experience directly, live more closely with, the interaction between myself and nature.

  Paul Caponigro

  Photography, Might, Photographer

  Paul Caponigro (2002). “New England Days”, p.7, David R. Godine Publisher

  38 Copy quote

• At the root of creativity is an impulse to understand, to make sense of random and often unrelated details. For me, photography provides an intersection of time, space, light, and emotional stance. One needs to be still enough, observant enough, and aware enough to recognize the life of the materials, to be able to 'hear through the eyes'.

  Paul Caponigro

  Photography, Art, Creativity

  Paul Caponigro (2002). “New England Days”, p.38, David R. Godine Publisher

  17 Copy quote

• We always point the lens both outward and inward.

  Paul Caponigro

  Lenses, Inward

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• The influence of mystery is the greatest influence.

  Paul Caponigro

  Photographer, Mystery, Influence

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• Photography is not easy. You know it takes a painter or a sculpture or a musician years to perfect their technique. Then they're free to make an expression in a matter of moments. It takes moments for a photographer to perfect his technique. And then it takes years for him to make it into something that is truly creative and worthwhile.

  Paul Caponigro

  Photography, Expression, Years

  9 Copy quote

• 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 spirit.

  Paul Caponigro

  Photography, Heart, Offering

  4 Copy quote

• 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.

  Paul Caponigro

  Discovery, Perception, Intuition

  Paul Caponigro (1972). “Paul Caponigro”

  7 Copy quote

• 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.

  Paul Caponigro

  Photography, Unique, Reality

  Paul Caponigro (1972). “Paul Caponigro”

  4 Copy quote

• If you are engaging rationality, you are already engaging a place that makes you unavailable. Only when I recognize that inspiration has announced itself to my availability will I then say I need to use my mind to calculate exposure, my emotions to position myself and arrange a configuration of shapes that need to come into being, my body to put it all in place because we have been given a message and it has come through inspiration through being available.'

  Paul Caponigro

  Inspiration, Availability, Mind

  4 Copy quote

• 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.

  Paul Caponigro

  Photography, Eye, Mind

  Paul Caponigro (2002). “New England Days”, p.9, David R. Godine Publisher

  8 Copy quote

• I use my music to tune myself.

  Paul Caponigro

  Tunes, Use, Photographer

  4 Copy quote

• All that I have achieved are these dreams locked in silver.

  Paul Caponigro

  Dream, Photographer, Silver

  4 Copy quote

• Under all of the factors that make up the art world, it's up to the individual artist to discern which of those influences are present and at what time and what really serves the deeper process that is constantly running like a stream underground. Influence is incessant. Influence is a fact. But, carry a big shovel and dig constantly to clear away all the unessentials so that the origins of mystery and the poetic force of life can get into and inspire the work.

  Paul Caponigro

  Running, Art, Inspire

  4 Copy quote

• ... the effort, diligence, and care required in practicing must be quickly suspended when pressure coming from anxiety or a desire for fast results causes them to degenerate.

  Paul Caponigro

  Effort, Anxiety, Desire

  4 Copy quote

• 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.

  Paul Caponigro

  Photography, Heart, Space

  7 Copy quote

• Can you keep your balance? Can you see what and where you are at any given moment?

  Paul Caponigro

  Balance, Photographer, Moments

  4 Copy quote

• The only way a work of art can become great is for one to acknowledge that it doesn't belong to anybody. The greatness is in constantly giving back, coming to an acknowledgment of the source. Look back to the source of any individual, any process, any set of materials. If the individual personality can relinquish its insistence on concepts like this is mine, I did it, this is original, nobody else has done it, it goes straight for greatness or the essential spirit.

  Paul Caponigro

  Art, Greatness, Giving

  7 Copy quote

• I don't trust any camera you can't make out of wood.

  Paul Caponigro

  Cameras, Woods, Don't Trust

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• Keep alive the fact that a mystery has come into existence and that a physical being serves as a house for this mystery.

  Paul Caponigro

  House, Alive, Facts

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• I've got to get the ultimate in composition today. or I've got to get the ultimate in light, I'll stay here until it appears. I was not making any demands. I went purely to see what would come, what might be there. I didn't have to be archaeologist or historian or tourist, I just needed to be available.

  Paul Caponigro

  Light, Tourists, Demand

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• Seek freedom within action.

  Paul Caponigro

  Action, Photographer

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• As far as my experience goes one is automatically in touch with the higher spiritual, it is connected to a certain level that interpenetrates our total physical and psychic existence. We are always in touch with it.

  Paul Caponigro

  Spiritual, Psychics, Levels

  4 Copy quote

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