Biography for the photographers
A brief bioography for the photographers featured in this exhibit.
Paul Caponigro
Born in Boston in 1932, Paul Caponigro is one of America’s foremost landscape photographers. While he became interested in photography at age of thirteen, he also had a strong passion for music; he studied at Boston University College of Music in 1950 before deciding to focus on photography at the California School of Fine Art, where Ansel Adams had established one of the first photography programs in the United States. Despite the shift from music to photography early in his artistic career, Caponigro remains a dedicated piano player who believes that his musical training and insight influences his photographic imagery. Caponigro is best known for his interest in natural forms, landscapes, and still lives. His subjects include Stonehenge and other Celtic megaliths of England and Ireland; the temples, shrines and sacred gardens of Japan; and the deep mystical woodland of New England. His had his first solo exhibition at the George Eastman House in 1958 and his work has been shown in numerous exhibitions throughout the United States and abroad. Throughout the 1960s he was a part-time teacher at Boston University while consulting on various technical research projects with the Polaroid Corporation. He has received two Guggenheim Fellowships and three National Endowment for the Arts (NEA) grants. In recognition of a career spanning nearly seventy years and a sustained, significant contribution to the art of photography, Caponigro was awarded The Royal Photographic Society’s Centenary Medal and Honorary Fellowship in 2001. Renske van Leeuwen (icp.org)
Rodney Smith
Rodney Lewis Smith (1947–2016) was born in New York City. He found his artistic inspiration while visiting the permanent collection of photography at the Museum of Modern Art (MoMA) during his junior year in college. After graduating from the University of Virginia in 1970, he went on to earn a master’s degree in theology from Yale University, while minoring in photography under Walker Evans. Smith was looking for meaning in his life, and photography provided a way for him to express himself. In 1976, he was awarded a Jerusalem Foundation Fellowship, which resulted in his first book, In the Land of Light. This three-month fellowship changed him profoundly, as he found nobility in a diverse mix of cultures and religions in the Middle East, where many people lived an 18th century existence in a 20th century world. Having found his niche, Smith traveled throughout the American South, Haiti and Wales, making soul-searching portraits of workers and farmers, as well as capturing the magnificence of the landscape. Influenced by the teaching and technical precision of Ansel Adams, Smith sought to perfect his own technique, narrowing his choice of camera, film, exposure, developer, and paper. He used light to edit and reveal his subjects, rendering them in a broad spectrum of tones, ranging from crisp white highlights to deep velvety shadows. Smith’s signature style emerged, making the world appear sharper and clearer, bringing order to chaos (rodneysmith.com).
Melissa Shook
Melissa Shook (1939-2020) was an American photographer, videographer, writer, and teacher based in Chelsea, Massachusetts, best known for her self- and family portraits and documentary-style photography humanizing marginalized people such as immigrants, the elderly, and the homeless, Shook's practice expanded throughout her career to include writing, bookmaking, drawing, sculpture, video art, and social practice. She was a pioneer in exploring identity, motherhood, and interracial families, channeling the spirit of creative freedom and attending the rise of feminism in the 1960s and 1970s (miyakoyoshinaga.com).