Caponigro's Apple Play Analysis

An Apple a Day Keeps This Photographer in Play

Waking up each morning, I turn off the alarm on my phone and am greeted with an image of beautiful pink peonies that I shot last Spring. As I check my email and messages, various other images roll through my visual field, but I honestly cannot recall what I saw just an hour later. This scenario repeats itself numerous times throughout the day. Photographic images have become such an integral part of daily life that we tend not to take notice until something special catches our eye. As a photographer, it’s that “something special” that makes me stop to look again, inspires me to learn more, and ultimately guides me in creating images. Many photographers have been important in my photographic education and many more images have made an impact on my personal technique and style, as it has developed over the last twenty-five years. I recall a number of “Aha!” moments when an image hit a homerun in my visual ballpark. However, one image, beyond all others, uniquely captures that “something special” for me. The …show more content…
Caponigro’s Apple is, at its core, a documentary photograph and a well composed one at that. Historically, it follows the genre of still life imagery present in so much of Western art; Apple is a simply an image of a red apple. But is it? That was the question I asked myself over and over again when I first viewed this image. It is certainly positioned well within the frame (edges) of the photograph and it is an apple, but it doesn’t end there. There is significantly more to this image than simply looking through the viewfinder and pressing the shutter release on a camera and that “more” is what continues to hold my attention a quarter of a century later. Capanigro’s technical ability allowed this image to effortlessly scale a visual cliff from the simple still life to something