Paul Caponigro was born in Boston in 1932 and encountered photography while studying piano at Boston University. Drafted in 1953, he was stationed in San Francisco as a photographer and there he met and studied with Benjamin Chin. Following his separation from the Army in 1955, he returned to Boston. Between 1957 and 1959 he studied with Minor White, and in 1958 he had his first one-man exhibition at George Eastman House. In 1962 he published his first portfolio of original prints and in 1967 his first monograph was published. In 1966 he traveled to Europe, in particular to Ireland and England, and returned there nearly every year for the next decade. In the early 1970s, he moved to Santa Fe, New Mexico where he lived for nearly twenty years before returning to his native New England to reside in Maine. Caponigro's photographs are in numerous museum collections throughout the United States and Europe. He has been the recipient of two Guggenheim Fellowships, and in 2001 he was enrolled as an honorary fellow of the Royal Photographic Society of Great Britain.