were a lot of the West Coast people would come to that place as well as the East Coast artists, the painters.

MS. LARSEN: And while you were there?

MR. CAPONIGRO: No.

MS. LARSEN: No?

MR. CAPONIGRO: These were all before I got there. This must have been the late '40s, '50s, maybe even a little earlier. But I think by the '60s and in the '60s, they had either died off or - Georgia was always hiding out. She didn't take part in the community. Ansel was very busy with his stuff. We saw him rarely there. His wife used to come through, Virginia Best Adams, who ran the Best Studio in Yosemite where Ansel exhibited his work and did a lot of his photographing in Yosemite. She actually would make yearly trips throughout the Southwest and buy blankets and jewelry, and sell them in her studio shop.

MS. LARSEN: Interesting.

MR. CAPONIGRO: So she came through quite a bit. And she visited with me a few times. But that whole period was like a block, the Santa Fe experience, that area, Taos and the likes of that. And then whatever artists were left, typical of the artists in that community, simply took off for the hills, hid out, and come out once in a great while. But while I was there, we had quite a number of younger and newer artists and photographers that knew of that golden period and certainly wanted to partake of the truly enchantment of that land. It is known as the land of enchantment, New Mexico, especially for the Indian culture. I think it still had a lot of magic because of the dances and the people themselves who held strongly to their old ways. That got really well watched over in the last ten years. So you had people like Ed Ranney.

MS. LARSEN: How do you spell that name?

MR. CAPONIGRO: R-a-n-n-e-y, who has been photographing the places like Machu Pichu and the ancient cultures of the Maya and the Aztecs, and doing a great job on that material. Bill Clift, who was one of my very early students, he actually moved out there before I got there, started photographing that landscape. Who else was actually out there? But a handful of young photographers who were kind of up-and-coming, like myself, up-and-coming. A relatively small community.

MS. LARSEN: Did you find an audience for photography there that was more than you might expect from other parts of the country? Or was that not so?

MR. CAPONIGRO: No. As a matter of fact, the Andy Smith Gallery, which is a pretty big gallery there now, was actually in Albuquerque and dealing with the old Edward Curtis material, had a business selling that stuff. He only later, I'd say in the late '70s, late '70s or early '80s, opened a gallery in Santa Fe proper and set it up as a full roster of photographers and sold their work there. Andy Smith Gallery. And then there was another young couple, Scheinbaum and Russek - Scheinbaum, David Scheinbaum, and Janet Russek - who started out - I mean, they're both photographers themselves. They started out by assisting both Eliot Porter in his last - now there's the other photographer, is Eliott Porter. Beaumont Newhall. Ann Mancy [phonetic] while she was still alive was teaching in Albuquerque. But he eventually, after his wife died - she was killed by a tree, which is rather poetic, on one of those raft trips. He then moved up to Santa Fe. So you did have Beaumont Newhall. You had Eliot Porter, one of the notable [inaudible]. Walter Chappell, who was part of that whole Rochester group when Beaumont was director of the George Eastman House. Walter, both Walter and Minor White, worked at the Eastman House, as well as Minor did his teaching at Rochester Institute.

MS. LARSEN: Did they come as visitors or -

MR. CAPONIGRO: No. Walter settled in. First he went to California, stayed there for a little bit, and then decided he wanted to come back to Santa Fe. He had been there earlier. That was when he lived in Taos. But he was around. That's quite a little community already.

MS. LARSEN: Yes. It is. That's very unusual.

MR. CAPONIGRO: And half of them - no, 75 percent of them - were Easterners, come from the East Coast.

MS. LARSEN: So you had people to talk to and people to look at your work and you look at their work, or not?

MR. CAPONIGRO: Yes. We'd get together. Bill Clift is pretty private. But being as I was one of his teachers, he didn't at all and still doesn't respect my opinion in looking at photographs and being able to say something about them. He's happy to share those with me, but for the most part he likes to keep to himself, as we all did. But Ed Ranney and I, my son John, and his daughters, Ed Ranney's daughters, were friendly. And so we were kind of friendly with the Ranney family. There was a lot of interaction there, so photographically, of course, we talked a little bit. Then there were quite a number of younger students who would be working with these people, including myself, would come spend time as an apprentice for a few weeks and -

MS. LARSEN: Were there workshops?

MR. CAPONIGRO: The workshops had not started yet. That didn't come till much later. David Scheinbaum did start teaching at the Santa Fe College. That has developed into a fairly good-sized program of teaching photography. But I arrived there in '74. Right through the early '80s, it was pretty quiet, just a handful of people. I think that by the early '80s into the mid-'80s, things started to explode. People got together and created a center for photography for exhibitions. That developed into a group of people who created a board of trustees to start collecting photographs for serious purposes.

MS. LARSEN: It's now very much identified with photography as a special part of what's its artistic accomplishment, I think.

MR. CAPONIGRO: Yes. And that was a slow buildup over a period of five to ten years.

MS. LARSEN: Ten years? Yes.

MR. CAPONIGRO: And of course, I spent only part of my time there. I'd spend six months, maybe, actually in Santa Fe because that's where my darkroom was. That's where I was centered. I never did well with the altitude, and my body did not like the dry climate. I always functioned at a deficit. For three months in the summer, I would come to Maine and I would teach a couple of workshops at the Maine photographic workshops. And the rest of the summer I'd just hang out because I wanted sea level and I wanted some moist air. Then I would go back, spend the fall, and come winter I would head for the West Coast and spend at least a couple of months there.

MS. LARSEN: What part?

MR. CAPONIGRO: That was my pattern. I like the Big Sur coast area, right up to the Monterey Peninsula and all the way down to Cambria. So that was my schedule.

MS. LARSEN: Those are good choices. [Laughs] Those are some of the best choices available in this country.

MR. CAPONIGRO: Yes. I wasn't unhappy with that. That was - and in the meantime, I still was running off to Europe, both teaching some workshops - did a lot of work in England. Got a grant. When was that? - Somewhere in the early '80s, 1984, '83, '85, thereabouts. Those three years, the English government gave me an artist grant to come and photograph a specific area of England, which is right up on the border between Scotland and England, a place called Hadrian's Wall. They wanted me to work the landscape. Gave me a grant, so much money to produce so many photographs.

MS. LARSEN: Were there stones there?

MR. CAPONIGRO: It's literally a stone wall built by the Romans. Hadrian's Wall.

MS. LARSEN: And how was that? Was that successful?

MR. CAPONIGRO: It was interesting. I got a few good photographs out of it. Half of them I haven't even printed yet. But at the same time, there were workshops being done in England where American photographers or European photographers would come and teach there. So they began to take - England began to take photography out of the simple, more or less commercially oriented courses in photography and the science of photography and began to institute the art of photography. I thought they were [inaudible] after that. And the Victoria and Albert Museum started collecting - well, they had been collecting, but they became more active. And then a new museum was set up somewhere in central England. A little grant from Kodak helped them get that going. It's called the National Gallery of Photography or something like that.

MS. LARSEN: Are there some English photographers who [inaudible] historically or contemporary?

MR. CAPONIGRO: Not that I remember. Not that I remember. There might have been one odd person here or there, but that would have been pretty rare.

MS. LARSEN: What about French photographers or other Europeans?

MR. CAPONIGRO: At that time, it was the mid-'70s. In fact, my first workshop with Mr. Lucien Clergue, who started the Rencontres. These were photo workshops and writing, a lot of people from Europe and America, for lectures and workshops and slide shows and, you know, just a lot of activity in Southern France, in Arles.

MS. LARSEN: How nice.

MR. CAPONIGRO: I was at, say, two or three of those. And he - Lucien Clergue drew heavily from the teachers that would come to the main photo workshop. So most of those Americans - Harry Callaghan was there, 1976, 1977, thereabouts. My memory just won't pull the name of the photographers that were running -

MS. LARSEN: Sure. Is it C-l-e-r-c? Lucien Clerc? Or C-l-a-i-r-e?

MR. CAPONIGRO: With a g-u in there. Lucien Clergue.

MS. LARSEN: I'm doing this for the transcriber.

MR. CAPONIGRO: Ah-hah. But my observation was that the British and the American photographers leaned heavily in the landscape, and there were some doing people in a very abstract manner. Who was that? But mostly what the American photographers were doing, a lot of landscape and then some journalism and some - not fashion, but very creative work with people. And the French were almost entirely photojournalists. That's what I noticed about that, all that interaction. And to this day, I mean, even the French photographers that come over still and teach the main photographic workshops mostly are oriented to the journalistic type of work.

MS. LARSEN: What do you think of, in general, the - I guess you've just said that. But, I mean, the American photography and European photography seem to me to have taken very different paths, very different domains as their interest. When I think of European photography, I think urban subjects so much and ties with art movements, surrealism in particular.

MR. CAPONIGRO: Yes. We would have [inaudible] especially, who is, I believe, now a painter. He doesn't photograph; he's a painter.

MS. LARSEN: So I've heard.

MR. CAPONIGRO: And he photographed most of the well-known painters at that time. So yes, there was a strong tie with the art community. Not so with the photography here in America. There's that schism, almost, that separation: Well, all right. If we have to accept photography as an art, you know, let's do it quietly. Put them over there in that corner. It really didn't - it took quite a while before it really got established. And then they got self-conscious. The photography art community quite self-conscious.

MS. LARSEN: Is that a good thing or not a good thing?

MR. CAPONIGRO: I think it is a bit childish, myself, going a little overboard in trying to do more than what would have unfolded. You know, there was an impetus to, well, now, let's show them that we really are artists and let's show them we can be creative. And to my mind, that was interfering with a slower and more natural unfolding of what photographic history would be. I think they kind of put a fire under the photographic history to kind of get it moving a little faster, and I don't think that's healthy.

MS. LARSEN: That's a very interesting point.

MR. CAPONIGRO: I think a lot of the conceptual photography that came out of that period was based on, well, here we are. We are an art. It's being accepted by the museums, shown in galleries. There are now galleries. And there weren't photographic galleries in the early - even up to the late '50s. Here we are, and we're getting established. We're getting recognition. Let's show them. And those that were being educated and getting full program degrees would not even leave the university. They'd stay there and teach. And I think that it went heavy on the intellectual side, which is where the conceptual stuff came.

MS. LARSEN: Well, I know from personal experience in the '70s that people studying photography in the university were in the same classes as people studying art or art criticism or art history, and that the strategies of art-making were talked about and shared across the board so that photographers in particular, I remember, would talk about their art strategy as though they had to have a road map and a way of being relevant to the critical world.

MR. CAPONIGRO: Being relevant.

MS. LARSEN: Yes.

MR. CAPONIGRO: What business does an artist have being relevant to an community or a system? I had a chat with Harry Callaghan, and I made one little slip. I said, "Well, you know, I'm obligated to think about these images." And he said, "Big mistake right there, son. Big mistake. You're not obligated. You are not free. You are talking about freedom in your photography, and you make that kind of a statement?" He said, "You're not free." And I thought, Harry, you got me.

MS. LARSEN: Uh-huh. [Affirmative] [Laughs]

MR. CAPONIGRO: So the freedom within, the expressing of oneself, the discovery, the work within photography. It got too - it precipitated too quickly with too many ideas. And didn't we go back to what the Photo-Secessionists were bitching about? It's not accepted as art, so we'd better paint some clouds in. We'd better paint this in. We'd better use a broom oil [phonetic] for this and this. And it was very arty and fabricated. And then you had the group that broke off and said, no way. No way. We're seceding from all this. We're going to be straight photographers. No messing and no hanky-panky. And then it went right back to the involvement of the plastic arts, where manipulation of the negative, putting scratches on them, going crazy about how space relates to the image - it's a lot of intellectual stuff that I could never get really interested in. Certainly it explained the process in terms of the technique and visually what effects were there, but I found the content too superficial. So all that stuff was coming in. Let's face it, the West Coast school had hold of photography as art. You know, Ansel and Weston and Stieglitz put a very solid ground under that type. And of course there's going to be a reaction to it, and you want there to be movement, but I think a much more natural movement than actually happened because the whole education process came in and pushed it in that direction. One had to be original, and that meant no more going to Yosemite. Ansel's been there and done that. No more going to Point Lobos. We've got those all catalogued. Do something original. But it wound up mostly - I mean, you have a student with a heart for nature, and these are cathedrals. They're not off limits. These are natural cathedrals. Anyone should be able to worship there and work there. And to be stunted and held back from that, you're going to get some perversion. You get this little bit of wildness come out that says, all right. They want it original? Boy, I'll really be different. And it gets perverse.

MS. LARSEN: As you were speaking, I was thinking - you don't need to comment, but I was thinking of Robert Heineken's work when he was teaching at UCLA, and all of that kind of chopping and cropping and kaleidoscopic stuff. And it never to me had a soul. You know, it seemed just sort of smart and kind of perverse, but not really -

MR. CAPONIGRO: I will give the world of photography a certain amount of experimenting that - you know, the first wriggling out of that cocoon, and the pains involved. You know, I'll go for that. But it does continue. What I saw was, for the most part, it was continuing in a direction of difference for the sake of being different. And that's when the soul gets left out. It becomes mostly an intellectual process. A certain amount of that would be necessary. And then it's, all right, where do we go? I mean -

MS. LARSEN: Well, there's also the other side of that equation, and that is the people who are devoted to technique, and worship at the altar of perfect print, and think if they go to the same place where Ansel Adams took a picture, that that's what it's all about. And, you know, that's boring as all get-out and sterile.

MR. CAPONIGRO: Yes. To this day there's this concern about falling into the tripod holes, as the old master said.

[Laughter]

MS. LARSEN: But when you're teaching, when you're doing workshops and you encounter these various attitudes, how do you deal with people who come with expectations either of making the perfect print or making work like your own or -

MR. CAPONIGRO: With a great deal of humor. Nonetheless, I do have a little - I have a tendency to puncture those balloons. Not without backing up. You know, I had an argument with the Zone system in the mid-'60s. And I thought, can you really pre-visualize? Is that true?

MS. LARSEN: What do you think?

MR. CAPONIGRO: Well, I set out to find out for myself whether that was. I think it was a misnomer. I think the idea was basically in the right direction. But to be able to pre-visualize your image of the final print while you're in the field? Ridiculous.

MS. LARSEN: Wasn't that something Weston said?

MR. CAPONIGRO: This is where it went bananas, as far as I could see. It was Weston who said, "I pre-visualize my image. I see what I want. And then I transfer it to the ground glass." He didn't say anything about the print. It was about seeing, oh, I want that tree and I want that stone, and I will transfer. Then I will crop and there is my - I pre-visualized my image. Ansel decided to put that into the print. Well, if Edward's going to pre-visualize his images there, I'm going to be pre-visualize my prints. And then this whole Zone system thing came out. And it's a good exercise, a perfectly good exercise to think, all right. I want so much shadow in my - detail in my shadow, and I've got to get the exposure right, and it's late with my ASA factor, and the development time controls it. I mean, the Zone system is six volumes of Ansel's thought and work and energy. And it's a lot. And you can get buried under it. It's an avalanche of information. The simplicity of it is you expose for your shadows and you develop for your high values, and that way you control both ends of what they call the continuous tone scale, and hold detail or information in such areas. And so there was that whole idea of brilliant prints with lots of tones, and being able to read information in most of those areas, and to pre-visualize and say, well, I want that to be on a zone so-and-so, and I want that to be - and I wanted to know, well, wait a minute, you know. Can you actually pre-visualize? Can you actually hold that tone? I'm going to find out. And I spent literally weeks in my darkroom with boxes of all kinds of junk and different types of developer and a densitometer and a voltage meter, a voltage - you know, something to hold the current steady. I tried to create a lab that would be consistent. And I exposed a lot of film. I even found a way to get rid of the color factor, by using a neutral density filter wedge scale to photograph rather than using color. Different types of film would respond to blues different and to reds different. So I eliminated the color. I went after it and said, can I hold this? Can I actually visualize that tone and get that tone in the final print? So I had to find a way to deal with getting an accurate reading of the negative in the printing process. What I was encountering, that you are getting - you're being tripped up by variable after variable in the photographic process. So the print itself, a final print, was known as a continuous tone, ranging in black and white from black to white in the range of tones. And the photographic process, I discovered, was nothing but continuous variable every step of the way. Buy a new box of film with the same label on it? The emulsion speed has changed. You got your fingers in the developer for making a print just a little too long; without even knowing it, you've raised the temperature a degree or two and you are not going to get the same exposure to result in a final print the same as the last one. In other words, there's no - if you're telling us that we're going to pre-visualize our prints, well, then, what the hell is burning and dodging all about? You don't pre-visualize burning and dodging in the field. Later they came up with the idea, well, I guess what we do is visualize. You have an idea. But pre-visualization, huh-uh [Negative]. And I used to say to my students, well, you know, if you can pre-visualize, I mean, I have only admiration for you. And I know that you have to live in a test tube. And if you actually get what you pre-visualized, then you deserve what you get.

MS. LARSEN: [Laughs.]

MR. CAPONIGRO: You deserve exactly what you get.

MS. LARSEN: Oh, there is a riddle answer. That's great.

MR. CAPONIGRO: And it will be the same each and every time, you know. That type of tight control - so I would try to impart: Listen, the Zone system has a lot of wonderful information. You know, put it right next to your photo lab index when you need some information, and go for it. But for the most part, you know, let experimentation come in and let your awareness of what is good be available when it actually arrives. So I try to leave it much more open. There's also this idea that in order to have that kind of control, then you must standardize. You've got to use that type paper, this type film, that type developer, and consistency. Well, I never was happy with that idea. I could not get what I wanted from nature into my prints or -

[END TAPE 6 SIDE A]

MS. LARSEN: - your ground here, that your take on it is remarkably - it's both profound and light-hearted at the same time, which is great.

MR. CAPONIGRO: Well, as I said from the beginning, with a lot of humor. I go at it with a lot of humor. But I needed to cut down some of the misconceptions, and especially the ones tied to such excessive control, which is still rampant today, especially on the West Coast. It's still -

MS. LARSEN: Is it also -

MR. CAPONIGRO: But what was the last thought that I was -

MS. LARSEN: You were talking about different papers, different toners.

MR. CAPONIGRO: Yes. To standardize to that degree, where everything was comfortably and securely and masterfully controlled and put into, you know, I thought, no. No. I don't want the color of that paper. I don't like the scale of that paper for this particular image I'm making. So most of my contemporaries, and a lot of students, are kind of fascinated that I have six, seven different brands of paper as well as variable contrast papers and graded papers. I have a wide range because to me, photography was just as fluid, if scientific or more technological, just as fluid as a painter who squirts colors onto his palette and then mixes them. I want to mix this developer, which is a cold tone developer, with that warm tone paper. It's a chlorobromide or a bromochloride or a something chloride, which has a different color to it. Let me see what happens when I mix a warm with a cold. And can I get somewhere in between? How do I get just a silver image? Well, you need to use that type of developer and this type of paper. So I needed a wide palette. And so I use any new paper that comes through. I'll run up and get a package - 25 sheets, I don't need very much - just to try it and see, does it have anything over and above this or that or a particular quality I can use. So they ask me, how do you get your prints? I say, well, a lot of hard work.

MS. LARSEN: Do you have a - it sounds like there would be, in your body of work, also issues, sort of connoisseurship issues, with some variability in the body of work you've done, that certain times, certain prints just come off as the best and the most marvelous or the biggest revelation. And do you think other people -

[Whistling sound]

MS. LARSEN: What's that?

MR. CAPONIGRO: That's my bird clock.

MS. LARSEN: Oh, that's great.

MR. CAPONIGRO: It's telling us that it's a new hour and a new bird call.

MS. LARSEN: That's great. I guess do people see your prints with the acuity that you see them? Do they see the differences in them?

MR. CAPONIGRO: I rather doubt it. Not at first. I think it needs a trained eye. There are obvious differences they can pick up. In fact, I created an exhibition called "The Voice of the Print" back in - I think in 1990, or was it '89? I think it was '90 - and printed one particular negative with two and three different types of paper to show that the image could be leaned toward a different feeling as a result of a cold printing or a warm printing or changing the scale of the image. And I demonstrated it visually so people could see directly what I'm talking about. If you just hand them a print, whether cool or warm, they're going to go after the subject and say, "Oh, I love trees or I love - it's so nice that you're from a rock and root school of photography." That was a term handed to me by one of my students, Marie Cosindas. She said, "Oh, yes, you're still doing that rock and root stuff." The rock and root school of photography. I thought that was very good.

MS. LARSEN: Uh-huh. [Affirmative] That's great, yes.

MR. CAPONIGRO: But no, it would take some training or another photographer to see what is going on.

MS. LARSEN: Do you think curators and dealers see your prints that way?

MR. CAPONIGRO: I hope so.

MS. LARSEN: They probably do.

MR. CAPONIGRO: I hope so.

MS. LARSEN: But they'd need to see a certain amount to be able to make those distinctions.

MR. CAPONIGRO: Yes. I was just thinking that what they see is quite limited. Very limited, as a matter of fact. And so they may not be aware at all.

MS. LARSEN: What institutions have the best holdings of your work, come to think of it?

MR. CAPONIGRO: The best is the Tucson Center for Photography. The have purchased upwards of 35 prints and a few portfolios. So they probably have a total number of prints anywhere from 75, possibly a hundred, maybe. Usually there's a dozen prints in each of the portfolios.

MS. LARSEN: That actually doesn't sound like so many.

MR. CAPONIGRO: Well, and that's the biggest. The rest of the collections around the country, a dozen. George Eastman House has eight or ten, maybe.

MS. LARSEN: Museum of Modern Art, do they have -

MR. CAPONIGRO: Museum of Modern Art has a half dozen, possibly. Very few. All around the country, different institutions have very few.

MS. LARSEN: How about the Getty? Do they have any?

MR. CAPONIGRO: The Getty has nothing.

MS. LARSEN: Nothing?

MR. CAPONIGRO: Well, they don't collect modern photographers. They're working on 19th Century material. I did show them some of my quite unique Polaroid images, which I consider part of my vintage group. They were made in the early '60s, and they're quite unique prints. And the Getty kept them there for a while and said they would consider them, but it would take - well, they had them for almost a year. Then they said, well, they need to keep them for another year.

MS. LARSEN: Goodness.

MR. CAPONIGRO: And at that point I said, well, why don't you just return them, and when you're really ready to consider them, I'll send them back if you're still interested. So that was - that went by the way. The Hallmark photo collection, I stopped to visit them, and in fact Keith Fenhaus came to my studio and he looked at quite a number of my vintage prints. He only wanted to see what's really vintage work. So there are a few connoisseurs out there. And the idea of vintage is very hot these days, especially in the market world.

MS. LARSEN: These are works that you printed at the time of their exposure? Is that - or just older work?

MR. CAPONIGRO: That's one basic definition. But it's a print made at the time. I mean, I made a negative last week and I made a print at the same time, you know. Is that a vintage print? I think it's much more the early work of the photographer. And if a connoisseur really wanted to have a field day, they should look at that early work and the middle period and my blue period.

MS. LARSEN: [Laughs.]

MR. CAPONIGRO: And on in, you know, because there are changes not only within my own life changes, but the materials that are available. There are certain papers that are - they stopped manufacturing twenty years ago. And they're quite unique emulsions. They have a very definite quality about them. For these, I think it's quite valid to collect these for a serious collector and a connoisseur. The vintage stuff definitely has something about them. They are unique.

MS. LARSEN: Have some of the emulsions or papers or materials disappointed you in time? Or have they all held up rather well? I know that some of my contemporaries who experimented with mixed techniques that weren't recommended made work that looked rather interesting at the time, but I just know for some prints that I actually own, I opened it up the other day and looked at it and it looks nothing like what it looked like fifteen years ago.

MR. CAPONIGRO: Have your eyes changed or -

MS. LARSEN: No, no. She mixed things - she never mixed them. They just were fugitive, although at the time she thought they weren't. She swore they were not. And so I'm - and my husband was not surprised. I was disappointed when I opened it up and looked at it. But -

MR. CAPONIGRO: Well, I've known, you know, in this new era of experimentation, conceptual photography, multimedia, all that kind of thing, I've met a few people who intentionally don't wash their prints, expecting that they are going to change. And they are interested in that change. I don't like being that unstable. You know, I don't like being - I mean, I like some control. I like to know that it's going to hold because I've given a lot of thought to this image. That print is just about where I want it for this time. Some brand-new paper might come along and offer a scale or a color that may enhance that, and I will think, gee. Great. Let me print it on that and see. And I might get maybe not a better result, but I get a different result. But I'm pretty much after stability. And that's a simple matter of chemistry. Just don't forget to do the hypo, and wash your prints. Wash the hypo a lot.

MS. LARSEN: Interesting.

MR. CAPONIGRO: If you don't wash the hypo out, then it turns around -

MS. LARSEN: Well, this is an issue in painting, of course. You know, different schools of painting have held up differently through time. And we're talking about a relatively similar time period here. You know, some paintings from the 1960s, for example, are not holding up physically very well, and yet they are admired. Like some of the color field paintings that were done with washes on unprimed canvas are not holding up terribly well. And that variability in technique is an issue in collecting of anything. Well, maybe going back to when you got to Santa Fe, did your work change appreciably from that difference, or were you still going to places that you were familiar with? It sounds as though you regularly came to Maine, and you regularly went to the West Coast. And was there a big shift of sensibility, or was it more continuity? In the '70s, now.

MR. CAPONIGRO: No. I would say the only real change that took place in my work over 45 years of time, 45 years of activity with photography, was the departure from the basic landscape to the prehistoric sites. And I was at first interested in trying to do something similar with the sacred sites of the American Indian, but caught on very quickly that they'd rather not be bothered. They've been bothered enough. And just out of courtesy, I simply stayed away. I wouldn't bring a camera to the dances. The dances are fabulous. At the pueblos where they allowed you to photograph - I think the last time I went to the Taos pueblo, which is one of the most ancient and quite beautiful, I walked through the gate and an Indian stopped me and said, "You want to make some pictures?" I said, "I'd rather like to." He said, "It's going to cost you. Big camera. Ten dollars for the camera, five dollars per leg on the tripod."

[Laughter.]

MR. CAPONIGRO: And that's for the tripod. Five dollars per leg.

MS. LARSEN: Was this the going rate or was he making -

MR. CAPONIGRO: Oh, he was having fun.

MS. LARSEN: Yes. He was making it up.

MR. CAPONIGRO: He was having fun. And I gave him his money. But they also say, look, you know. We want you to stay on this side of the river. You know, don't go into the pueblo. We have our lives. And I respected that. So I've made a few pictures. Mostly I've gotten photographs of the ancient ruins that are not inhabited.

MS. LARSEN: Like where?

MR. CAPONIGRO: Bandolier. Puyé. Chaco Canyon. That wonderful place that all of the photographers have gone to from the earliest days -

MS. LARSEN: Mesa Verde?

MR. CAPONIGRO: Well, Mesa Verde is one of them. And then the one in - I'm having a block-

MS. LARSEN: It'll come to you.

MR. CAPONIGRO: Canyon de Chelly. You can go in Canyon de Chelly, and there are these cliff-dwellers, these wonderful sheer cliffs with the buildings at the base of them. Everybody has photographed those. So I did some of that material. And I did really just as much photographing of the Southwest landscape, which to me was part of that sacredness. You know, the Indians held it as sacred. So it wasn't just where they had put their buildings. The land was sacred, so I turned away from the project with doing anything direct with the culture and their important sites and their activities, and simply the ancient sites that were available to the public in the landscape in general is what I did. That was more going back to my landscape photography than it was working specifically with a certain set of stones or, as I did in Japan, the Buddhist temples.

MS. LARSEN: How did that come about? How did going to Japan come about?

MR. CAPONIGRO: Oh, yes. I met a Japanese sensei who was an acupuncturist. My health from the mid-'70s took a strong turn downward because up to the mid-'70s, I had been all over hell and back. And then my career had taken off. I got married and we had a child. I was traveling back and forth between home and travel, and sometimes they went with me, sometimes - I was carrying an awful lot. And then some publications began to come. A lot of the universities around the country wanted me as a guest artist, and in fact, eventually wanted me to set up a department and just stay there, which I thought was not going to help me as a photographer. I really wanted to be free enough to move out and photograph. So I declined on several offers. That whole period really tired me out. It was very tiring. And it was 1976, '75 - 1975. Somebody said, "Go see this new guy that's come to town, Sensei Nakazono. He's a very good acupuncturist." And I did go to him. And he was helpful. He would really - you know, I had low thyroid and I had low adrenals. I really was blown out. And he would give my energy a lift. And I thought, hey, this guy is pretty good. He had some books on his shelf that he had written about a certain ancient religion called Kototama. And I would take them off the shelf while I was waiting for my turn to get stuck with the needles -

MS. LARSEN: Yes. Ooh. [Laughs.]

MR. CAPONIGRO: I understand. And so I would question him. I'd say, you know, what is this business?

MS. LARSEN: It's written in English?

MR. CAPONIGRO: Yes. It was in English. He and his two sons were practicing. They were from Japan. They had traveled quite a bit. They left Japan, traveled quite a bit, and then decided to settle in Santa Fe. And they were literally teaching Aikido, which is one of the martial arts. But they taught it not just from the martial point of view but in terms of dealing with energy and as a spiritual practice of learning what you're about and how you work and self-knowledge, self-awareness. All of that was in there. And I said, "This Kototama sounds very interesting." He said, "Oh, well, maybe you would like to come to one of my classes and see what it's about," which I did. And it was about announcing sound, literally the vowels and the consonants. There's a whole system of vowels and consonants interacting, and the real practice was breathing and getting the sounds to come from a particular place they call the tandem [phonetic]. And you hear about that in Tai Chi and Qui Gong.

MS. LARSEN: Yes. I was just thinking how similar this sounds.

MR. CAPONIGRO: And it's an Eastern practice of reaching a certain energy in the belly. And these ancient sounds from the Kototama, there was a particular system that's a little too much to elaborate at this time. But I took a strong interest in it, and he saw that I really was trying to get hold of it. And he said, "Well, you know, you ought to go to Japan and meet my teacher. He is one of a handful, maybe six people in all of Japan, who know that this system even exists. It is a very ancient system that has gotten lost, probably from 4000 B.C. or earlier.

MS. LARSEN: It sounds very Chinese in a way. Some affinity with Chinese things.

MR. CAPONIGRO: Possibly. Possibly.

MS. LARSEN: I don't know. But he said, "You should go because they may be able to help you understand more. I can give you so much. But you may also want to experience Japan," he said. "But don't ask the average person or even the educated men in Japan what the Kototama is because they will not know. You know, you go and talk to my teacher. You will see." And really, the roots of Shinto is from this. And even the Shinto priests don't have the deeper information about this ancient practice of sound meditation.

MS. LARSEN: And Shinto is so old.

MR. CAPONIGRO: And Shinto is old. This went even further back. So there were - I became aware of a few Japanese mystics who set up -

MS. LARSEN: Where? In Kyoto?

MR. CAPONIGRO: Not in Kyoto, but one is in Kamayoka, which is west of Kyoto. And they have become a religion. It's called the Oomoto religion, O-o-m-o-t-o, Oomoto. And they believe that the practice of art is a means of realization, that you can reach inner states by engaging your craft to a degree and with an intensity that could bring you to those internal places.

MS. LARSEN: That sounds like many of the things you've been saying.

MR. CAPONIGRO: Yes, it does. And so I thought, yes. Okay, I'll go for this because there's something happening here and I have something to learn. So I studied the Kototama with the Japanese Sensei Nakazono here. He kept my health up. I went to Japan right after my divorce in 1976 in a state of hypoglycemia. I was full-blown hypoglycemic at that time. My health was really shaky. But also, my work was - I was so intense about my work that I could forget the problems and just go and do the work. And I found out what I wanted to find out, you know. And it was extremely helpful. And that's why I photographed the Buddhist temples and Shinto shrines, whatever -

MS. LARSEN: Did you go from one to the other on the trip?

MR. CAPONIGRO: Yes. I just traveled around Japan. And we'd get invitations to go to certain places. The Oomoto people were very helpful. And they pinned a note on my sleeve. I couldn't speak any Japanese. They would pin a note on me and put me on the train and show me a picture of the man that was going to pick me up at the other end.

MS. LARSEN: Like a child, really.

MR. CAPONIGRO: Exactly. Exactly. But they were extremely helpful. Very, very helpful. Anything I needed, very, very helpful. And they'd pick me up at the other end, and I would get introduced to the abbot of the Shinto shrine here or the one over there. And I visited the Grand Shrine of Issei in the south. So I got around. It was about a three-month period. And I had the help also of an American, Robert Singer, Robert Singer's son, who is now with the L.A. County Museum.

MS. LARSEN: Yes.

MR. CAPONIGRO: Do you know Robert Singer?

MS. LARSEN: I've met him. I've met him, yes.

MR. CAPONIGRO: Yes. He was over there. And he helped me a lot.

MS. LARSEN: He's a nice person.

MR. CAPONIGRO: A very nice person. Very good.

MS. LARSEN: Yes. Right.

MR. CAPONIGRO: He was very, very helpful while I was over there. He gave me - he introduced me to a young student who was interested in photography who spoke enough English that he could be my guide or my driver.

MS. LARSEN: That's nice. Yes.

MR. CAPONIGRO: Go into the shrines or the temples and talk to the abbot and say, "This American photographer wants to work," and this, that, and the other. I would always have a couple of my books with me so that the abbot could see that, you know -

MS. LARSEN: Sure.

MR. CAPONIGRO: - I was serious about it. And the guide would come out and invariably would say, "The abbot wants to know who is this Oriental photographer that wants to work in these?" They thought the work had a very Oriental quality about it.

MS. LARSEN: Which I think it does.

MR. CAPONIGRO: It does.

MS. LARSEN: Yes. Yes. It does. Yes.

MR. CAPONIGRO: So that's how I got involved with the temples and the shrines.

MS. LARSEN: How did that all affect you? Did you -

MR. CAPONIGRO: The Japanese sensibility was right up my alley. Right up my alley. I wish I could have stayed and apprenticed to somebody. The whole idea of, first of all, being invited in, you know, is a very strong consideration. You just don't let anything disturb a sacred atmosphere. Here in America, anything goes. You know, everything may just as well be a baseball field, and everybody comes as rowdy as you can - you know. But the sense that, well, what do you really want? What do you expect? And what can you contribute? And you can contribute - if you have nothing to contribute, then make it your silence. Make that your contribution. And I liked that idea. First of all, before you enter this space, if you are interested in learning, take your shoes off. When you get in the space, shut up and watch. And that whole - you know, that's been the basis of my working. I get behind my camera, and I'm with nature or I'm with whatever. It's communion. So that whole way of life, especially in the arts and their religion, because they didn't separate it, was right up my alley. And I loved what was being produced because that internal life was being imparted to the work. It wasn't merely self-expression. It was art as sacred business. So that appealed to me greatly. And I truly - like three months was an acquaintance. I got a few good pictures, but I got - scratched the surface. And I would love to come back here and work more. And then, of course, the money system went out of bounds.

MS. LARSEN: Right.

MR. CAPONIGRO: Ten bucks for a cup of coffee. Hotel bills, unbelievable. And I thought, no. I can't do it. I had my second Guggenheim grant which was supporting me. A few thousand dollars of that was to go to it.

MS. LARSEN: Sure. But it ran out fast.

MR. CAPONIGRO: And it ran out fast. But at that time, it was manageable. It was manageable. But within a year or two after that, there was no way I could go back, even with a couple of grants, to do that.

MS. LARSEN: I felt the same way about Japan.

MR. CAPONIGRO: Absolutely.

MS. LARSEN: Nothing I saw, touched, smelled, ate, was near anything but the right thing. I loved it.

MR. CAPONIGRO: Total respect of materials and those who would partake of it.

MS. LARSEN: Yes. The artist's place in society is not overly fawned over or treated with disrespect. It's integral, and it's -

MR. CAPONIGRO: Absolutely. And the idea of national treasures, you know, that is a rarity. They get near it in Europe, but there's still a bit of a free-for-all. But to say, no, we consider art as sacred, and one can enter a sacred domain by the proper practice of art or with the right spirit of art, and these men are worthy because they have produced and shown that their life is integral with it, and therefore they are treasures for the country. We don't have any national treasures in the United States.

MS. LARSEN: And I wonder, if we did, how we would choose them. The system without the culture is maybe - would be as laughable as -

[Laughter]

MS. LARSEN: I think the culture and the system are beautifully in synch.

MR. CAPONIGRO: I kind of saw the truly ancient Chinese. The modern Chinese have that problem with the political systems and all that. But the ancient Chinese, which is where the Japanese got a good deal of their culture, and the ancient Japanese systems - like they have grandfathers. And in Europe, they still have an attitude towards art that is close to it, maybe a little more loose at the edges. A lot of the experimenters came. Good stuff, Impressionists and this and that. And I see them as the uncles and aunts. And here in America, we're the teenagers. Teenagers. Unruly.

MS. LARSEN: No respect.

MR. CAPONIGRO: No respect.

[Laughter]

MR. CAPONIGRO: So being an artist in America is tricky.

MS. LARSEN: Yes. Well, from the things we've talked about in general, aside from Boston and New York in the early days, you've lived outside the big urban art centers also. I think a lot of artists do. But at least in painting, often, people feel they need to be in the urban center to progress in their art.

MR. CAPONIGRO: Progress in your art. That's the recent - in recent years, the last ten years, how many artists from around the country would have to buy a loft in New York City in order to be there long enough to be totally abused. They would be touted. They would be red carpet. They would have -

[END TAPE 6 SIDE B]

MR. CAPONIGRO: - not only my own personal dream world. The studies I have made of the various religions, the sacred sites I have visited, the recognition that certain portions of land which the ancients recognized had power within it to affect the human being, to reach deeper within himself - all of that had come into play at the time of my accident. And it presented the image and the possibility of death as a puzzle. And what I realized only after I'd come through it - because it's a great struggle to keep a physical body, in pain, upright and continue to function until it heals - but it said, you asked about death. That was your question. You have been investigating it esoterically speaking, through the religions, the questions of the beyond, other worlds, et cetera, et cetera. Here it is. You know, it's your question, and you grapple with it and we can assist you in maybe getting some understanding about it. But this is going to be a process that you will have to continue. I actually was given a choice to either go through that door or death or to come back and continue working. Those on the other side were prompting me to come back. I wanted very much to go through it. But with all that interaction, I finally realized, yes.

MS. LARSEN: More to do.

MR. CAPONIGRO: There's more to do here. And it's actually an opportunity in very different ways of my will. Well, that's when the other forces informed me. It said, well, this is one particular kind of death. You will be going through a succession of deaths. These others will be primarily psychological in nature and, you know, you should watch for them. And so leaving Santa Fe was another death. Restructuring my world with the photographic galleries and my business was another death. It was a series of interactions -

MS. LARSEN: And closures of things.

MR. CAPONIGRO: - with my personal, business, creative, all of that. That was stretched out over a period of the last eight years. And I can mark them. I can see them. Sometimes I could never see them coming, but suddenly, boom. I'm like, oh, yes. Oh, okay, another one. Another. And all I can think is that it's part of that process of shut up and listen. What's next? Well, you know, don't agitate your intellect into that place where you'll start manufacturing something of what's next. You should be - you know, everybody in the world, well, they want to know, oh, what's your next project? Well, I just finished an exhibition, and it's hanging now, and it took me two years to do it. And it all ended yesterday, and you want to know what's next? That attitude of discipline and -

MS. LARSEN: Career.

MR. CAPONIGRO: All that kind of stuff, yes. That was to be absolutely wiped away. And to listen carefully, just wait for the day and see what's next. It's taken me the eight years of either having certain identifications I've had pulled away from me, or my seeing that they must be released. Give it over. Give it over. Lost but not lost. Making space for - well, you won't know until you find the space, when you are in that space. And that's what the last eight years have been. 1992 right up to - we're almost hitting 2000. And I don't know what they're going to shoot me at.

MS. LARSEN: Well, it's a nice place to be here.

MR. CAPONIGRO: It's a good place to be, yes. Yes, Maine is - I always thought of Santa Fe and that area as a rather vertical energy in the land. It kind of is demanding of you.

MS. LARSEN: Yes.

MR. CAPONIGRO: And keeps you on your TV, so to speak. And when I come here to Maine, it's a more horizontal energy that you can move into and will envelope you, in a way, and assist.

MS. LARSEN: What do you do with the whole Maine picturesque kind of aspect which, you know, is true in Santa Fe and California, almost every place you've talked about. But it's true for painters, and this is a picturesque place with lots of clichés abounding. And you've known this place for a long time, a lot longer than I've certainly known it. What do you think of Maine?

MR. CAPONIGRO: As most places. It can be very picturesque. The West Coast school has these glorious mountains, which you've heard the criticism, are like glorious postcards. And any place will offer beauty as a sentimental something. If you respond sentimentally, then you will get -

MS. LARSEN: Sentimentality.

MR. CAPONIGRO: Sentimentality. What I have been finding and what may be helping me is this - well, first of all, my own maintenance of a basic question. No formulation of words. A question: Meaning, what is meaning? Not the meaning of meaning. Meaning itself is a process, and it has the form of a question. And I don't know how better to describe it because we all want specifics. Well, what are you going to do next? Well, take a break. Well, that's good. It's good to take a break.

MS. LARSEN: [Laughs.] But after you take a break -

MR. CAPONIGRO: Define it. Define it. Give me the box and then fill it. And so I've had to break all of that. Like I remain in my question, which means that I continually take off my shoes and I keep my mouth shut. Then I am a question which is receptive, and not demanding, an answer. So this whole process has been keeping and honing my question stance. And I can see how pretty that is and how - well, you know. And at the same time, I've missed my photography. Unfortunately, the accident plus other things coming along minimized the amount of time or the kind of weight I can carry into the field, a big view camera, et cetera. It's slowed me down. And I've felt a bit frustrated about being slowed down. But then you realize, you know, you'd have burned a lot more film and there would be a lot less on it. And what's happening really is you are there and you are experiencing and seeing possibilities, but not everything is taking. But you now have the edge of realizing, well, you only need to take that. And it pushes away the pretty stuff. So Maine, as far as I'm concerned, hasn't been photographed yet.

MS. LARSEN: I agree with you.

MR. CAPONIGRO: It has not been photographed yet.

MS. LARSEN: It's not been painted yet, either, for some reason.

MR. CAPONIGRO: Exactly.

MS. LARSEN: The Maine of the now. You know, this - I don't mean just topically now, but I mean, just living in this moment and seeing it for what it is. Not that overlay of nostalgia that is constantly around here, and sentimentality.

MR. CAPONIGRO: But who is going to produce that? Hasn't that been the problem over how many years off Sunday painters. And it takes - just as our friend Joseph Campbell said, one of the heroes has to venture forth and go out into the unknown and bring back the gift. That is the problem, is to become one of those heroes with a thousand faces. So that's the costume I have to adopt. The others just don't fit any more. And that's how Maine will get photographed.

MS. LARSEN: Good. I hope so. I'm looking forward to seeing that.

MR. CAPONIGRO: But then if you look in back of you -

MS. LARSEN: Uh-huh. [Affirmative] I see the camera.

MR. CAPONIGRO: You see the camera, and it's got an object under it just waiting to be photographed. Go ahead and look.

MS. LARSEN: This is beautiful. Flowers, and I like the acorns, too. [Inaudible]

MR. CAPONIGRO: They may. They may or not. But, see, what's been happening since I moved into this place a little over a year ago, you see all these dried flower arrangements. I've been collecting them, will continue to collect them and dry them. I've been collecting shells for quite some time. But now they're coming out of the boxes.

MS. LARSEN: Good.

MR. CAPONIGRO: And so this whole room is a studio in which, you know - you've been here three or four times already, and you notice that these -

MS. LARSEN: I have noticed them as decoration.

MR. CAPONIGRO: As decoration.

MS. LARSEN: But I haven't noticed them as subject matter.

MR. CAPONIGRO: But suddenly a particular group of those dried petals found themselves on a wooden bowl in front of the camera. But that's the same as trying to photograph Maine. Wait until Maine announces itself and you are not being over-sentimental or insisting on making - you've got to make [thumps table] five photographs today or I have no discipline. Discipline. That idea of discipline is too American, you know. Produce, produce, without really any discrimination. So my whole studio is Maine, landscape, and the room in which I collect pieces of Maine. Now, there's some milkweed that's been waiting since last fall, waiting to be recognized and placed in an image. So this is where the work will take place.

MS. LARSEN: In the winter, do you think you'll be working indoors more than outdoors?

MR. CAPONIGRO: No.

MS. LARSEN: No? Not necessarily?

MR. CAPONIGRO: Not necessarily. This last winter I had a great deal of printing to finish up. I produced one new show. And the last four or five years has been primarily printing negatives that never got printed before. So that has helped me get past the frustration of missing my camera and not being behind it out in nature. Regular work with the printing, that's good in its own way. But I can feel the new thrust is going to be using some film.

MS. LARSEN: Great. That's good.

MR. CAPONIGRO: And I'm very pleased about it.

MS. LARSEN: Well, I would think you would be. My goodness. That's where the energy is. That's where the adventure is.

MR. CAPONIGRO: So in terms of my history, leaving New England after Ireland was a turning point. Going to the Southwest, that was a long period continuing with my personal religious and esoteric studies, as well as getting involved with some new landscape out in the Southwest. Getting to Japan. That whole period was very stable in that direction. A lot of teaching still. A lot of workshops, et cetera. Right up to 1989, which was the 150th birthday of photography. I did nothing in the United States. I lived in Europe for five months. Lived out of a suitcase in Europe for five months because I was invited to two or three exhibitions they wanted from me, lectures. I must have done six or seven workshops through Finland and Belgium and Italy. I also went through Norway looking at the stave churches trying to find some photographs there. So I photographed. Taught. I did all that in this long, long period that contributed to really feeling wasted when I got back. And that's what prompted me to go to the West Coast. 1989, I got back in the fall, and my tongue was hanging out. I stayed with my son, who had already bought his house in Maine, before I went back to Santa Fe. Tried to catch my breath here. And then I went back to Santa Fe and thought, there's too much work. I'm tired. Rent a place by the sea in Big Sur and take the rest. Rent a piano and -

MS. LARSEN: Sounds idyllic. Sounds great.

MR. CAPONIGRO: Absolutely idyllic. But it was the very place where I - after - once I got set in, and it took me a few weeks, then I took the fall.

MS. LARSEN: Yes. That was the big turning point.

MR. CAPONIGRO: Right there, over the edge. Bam.

MS. LARSEN: Wow.

MR. CAPONIGRO: So that was the turning point, yes. And since that time, as I say, the last eight years has been a crucible, a true crucible daily. And I'm in the bowl, and there's this big pestle, mortar and pestle, business, grinding, grinding, and still.

MS. LARSEN: Do you feel like you've never recovered from that accident, or are you feeling that you are recovered in a -

MR. CAPONIGRO: It left some dents. It left some dents.

MS. LARSEN: I think most things that happen to us that are profound like that, we're never the same. But you find your equilibrium again and move on.

MR. CAPONIGRO: Yes. But the equilibrium I'm finding - because I've gone through a lot of heck. I've tried the doctors. I've tried the acupuncturists. I've tried the chiropractors. And I still use them. They each have their specialty that can be helpful. But I've spent a lot of time in trying to get it fixed, and forgetting that it has its own time of fixing itself. So in the last two years, I've decided I really don't want to turn myself over to someone I think is going to repair the damage. I'm sick and tired of thinking about it. And I'm feeling better already that I'm not going to be sitting in somebody's office waiting, but rather living with it because I do see that it goes in and out, up and down. Yes, it hurts today. I mean, my knees are not in good shape. And some days, maybe the weather affects them. All right, so I move a little slower today. Other days, it's working okay.

MS. LARSEN: Yes.

MR. CAPONIGRO: And that's what I have to work with.

MS. LARSEN: Well, we all - you know, I have an old friend who says we're all three-dimensional. We all - there's nobody perfect, nobody untroubled.

MR. CAPONIGRO: [Laughs.]

MS. LARSEN: You know, some people seem so. But, you know, we all have our dents as we go through life.

MR. CAPONIGRO: Yes. Well, and the last eight years has shown me that one has to partake in the process of letting go, that you join it in spirit. And then, well, okay. I've already got this much. But that much will get me there. I'm not going to give that much to the M.D. who wants me to live on these pills as an experimentation. That's going to be a real waste of time, not to mention some side effects. All of that, I think, okay. Enough, everything. Enough. I've got enough to work with.

MS. LARSEN: Well, you certainly have a beautiful place, and well-honed equipment, both mentally and otherwise.

MR. CAPONIGRO: Yes. In the last eight years, putting it together little by little, little by little. I knew I had to stop this. I need this. I don't need that. And I think I'm ready to photograph unencumbered from this day forward. I've even given up my trip to Ireland to focus here and work with these shells and work the Maine landscape. I want to be centered. I don't need the stress of packing for the trip, and I'm going to be maybe a month, and get jet lag and waste time there with that, and come back here with more jet lag, and - no.

MS. LARSEN: The life you've described is of a pilgrim and wanderer and a seeker and someone who's, you know, adding one thing to the next thing and really, truly adding, putting things together, but on a trajectory, on a path. Pilgrim in the landscape which comes to the fore.

MR. CAPONIGRO: Yes. As I said to my son just last night. We were having dinner, and his student was with him there, who asked me, "What's your next project? And where would you really like to go to photograph?" I don't want to go anywhere until I can make five really good images in my own back yard.

MS. LARSEN: That sounds very wise.

MR. CAPONIGRO: And just the concentration of that, the attitude of that instead of, oh, wouldn't it be great to get away and - yes, I'd love to see my beloved Ireland. But I want to be able to spend time with her. Rather, I will go at another time. Then that will be possible. For now, it seems like everything has arranged itself, and I've got it sufficiently ordered that I can work effectively, from the coffee pot in the kitchen into the living room where most of my shells and my camera are set up.

MS. LARSEN: And the beautiful woods.

MR. CAPONIGRO: And the woods.

MS. LARSEN: And the home, which is taking shape. Okay. I think that's great. Is that a wrap?

MR. CAPONIGRO: Thank goodness.

[END TAPE 7, SIDE A]

[END OF INTERVIEW.]

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