Frosted Window #2, Ipswich, Massachusetts

Paul Caponigro began photographing in his native New England, cultivating an approach to natural imagery that combined the zone system of Ansel Adams and the Zen-like approach of Minor White. His goal, he said in 1963, was “to work, by way of the photographic image, toward an understanding of that relation which exists between one’s inner activity and one’s external environment.” Returning to Massachusetts from the West Coast, he lived in a farm-house in the woods of Ipswich, where he made this photograph of frost etched on a windowpane. Hugh Edwards admired Caponigro’s exquisite prints and acquired 18 for the collection in 1969.