Top 50 John Paul Caponigro Quotes (2025 Update)

1. “The frame frames a frame of mind.”

— John Paul Caponigro

2. “My mantra is, ‘This or something better.’”

— John Paul Caponigro

3. “Education, or enrichment, is a dynamic, evolving, lifelong process. Every time you look, sensitively with awareness, your vision grows.”

— John Paul Caponigro

4. “Art is a journey of discovery.”

— John Paul Caponigro

5. “Looking and seeing are two different things.”

— John Paul Caponigro

6. “The best plans evolve.”

— John Paul Caponigro

7. “Color is a powerful physical, biological, and psychological force.”

— John Paul Caponigro

8. “It takes asking many questions from many perspectives to truly understand something.”

— John Paul Caponigro

9. “Inquiry is more important than answers, for it is the questions we ask and the way in which we ask them that defines us.”

— John Paul Caponigro

10. “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.”

— John Paul Caponigro

11. “Less information often leads to more interpretation.”

— John Paul Caponigro

12. “We are the strongest filter we can place before the lens. We point the lens both outward and inward.”

— John Paul Caponigro

13. “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.”

— John Paul Caponigro

14. “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.”

— John Paul Caponigro

15. “A good question has many answers.”

— John Paul Caponigro

16. “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.”

— John Paul Caponigro

17. “Many times we are tempted to defer to the documents we create, rather than the direct experiences we have.”

— John Paul Caponigro

18. “Images are altered in many ways, to many degrees, and for many reasons, so it’s important for viewers to be informed of both.”

— John Paul Caponigro

19. “What we see changes what we know. What we know changes what we see. Perception, belief, action, and change are codependent.”

— John Paul Caponigro

20. “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?”

— John Paul Caponigro

21. “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.”

— John Paul Caponigro

22. “We don’t have enough words for photography. Can you imagine writers having only one word for writing?”

— John Paul Caponigro

23. “I don’t trust any camera you can’t make out of wood.”

— John Paul Caponigro

24. “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.”

— John Paul Caponigro

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

— John Paul Caponigro

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

— John Paul Caponigro

27. “Different people can photograph the same things with the same tools and create such different images.”

— John Paul Caponigro

28. “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.”

— John Paul Caponigro

29. “How do we know what we know? Is seeing believing? Is believing seeing?”

— John Paul Caponigro

30. “A photograph is an invitation to look – and to look at looking.”

— John Paul Caponigro

31. “Photography extends our perception allowing us to see and experience more – second hand.”

— John Paul Caponigro

32. “Surfaces simultaneously reveal and conceal.”

— John Paul Caponigro

33. “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.”

— John Paul Caponigro

34. “All that I have achieved are these dreams locked in silver.”

— John Paul Caponigro

35. “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.”

— John Paul Caponigro

36. “Every photograph is altered, to one degree or another.”

— John Paul Caponigro

37. “It’s one thing to make a beautiful thing; it’s another thing to make a living thing.”

— John Paul Caponigro

38. “Seeing creates growth.”

— John Paul Caponigro

39. “I’d say seeking is one of the fundamental artistic impulses. Art is about discovery. The medium is not the message.”

— John Paul Caponigro

40. “I use my music to tune myself.”

— John Paul Caponigro

41. “Photographs are never records of the way things are; they’re records of the way things were.”

— John Paul Caponigro

42. “The influence of mystery is the greatest influence.”

— John Paul Caponigro

43. “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.”

— John Paul Caponigro

44. “Can you keep your balance? Can you see what and where you are at any given moment?”

— John Paul Caponigro

45. “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.”

— John Paul Caponigro

46. “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?’”

— John Paul Caponigro

47. “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.”

— John Paul Caponigro

48. “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.”

— John Paul Caponigro

49. “Seek freedom within action.”

— John Paul Caponigro

50. “Above all, remember that the computer simply isn’t as intelligent as you are.”

— John Paul Caponigro