Running White Deer, County Wicklow, Ireland

Date

1967

Creator

When Paul Caponigro traveled to Ireland to photograph in 1966, he had a decade’s experience among the leading creative photographers of San Francisco and New York. He was enchanted by the country’s spiritual ambiance, and strove to photograph the insubstantial. At a private estate in Caponigro photographed a herd of fallow deer in an extensive park. He set up his view camera concealed by a stand of trees, and adjusted the lens to its widest aperture for the day’s subdued light. When the herd bolted past, he barely managed to snap the shutter. In the darkroom he was surprised to discover this image of ghostly deer speeding through the frame beneath a canopy of branches. The artist was skilled enough to crop this image from the lower quadrant of the negative, and enlarge it into a wide panorama, still retaining subtle tonality of the exposure. from Touchstones of the Twentieth Century: A History of Photography at the University of Notre Dame (exhibition, 2020-21)