For some artists, validation comes when their work appears in a major gallery or museum show. For others, it comes in the form of a retrospective. John Paul Caponigro found it in a snowflake.

A gallery owner was preparing a catalog for an exhibition of Caponigro’s work, and he called to ask the artist whether the snowfall in a photograph was actually there or whether he had added it to the frame digitally.

Caponigro looked at the picture. Then he looked again. But he wasn’t sure, and he still isn’t.

“I felt like I was finally in the shoes of the viewer,” he said recently at his Cushing studio. “I can’t tell. I really like that relationship of uncertainty. It makes me look a lot closer and a lot longer.”

His work will be open to interpretation during an exhibit from 10 a.m. to 5 p.m. Saturday and Sunday at the studio, and Caponigro will give gallery talks both days at 2 p.m.

The annual exhibit gives him a chance to interact with viewers and hear their reactions – some of which are hilarious. At one show, a 4-year-old boy looked at an image of clouds that looked as if Caponigro had placed a mirror down the middle of the image, and said, “Wow, it’s a giant sneeze!”

A man wanted to buy the same photograph, but his wife wouldn’t let him. When he asked her why, she said it looked like an X-ray of someone sitting on a toilet.

Through digital technology, Caponigro challenges viewers’ conceptions of what photography is and what it should be. Though his work focuses on the natural world, he uses computer programs such as

Adobe Photoshop to enhance the images. Often they look more like what we see, rather than what the camera sees. But in the case of the symmetrical clouds, his hand is obvious.

“I’m kind of considered anti-documentary,” Caponigro, 38, said. “People assume it’s been altered. I think the message I’m sending is that we all have to be more aware of this issue. It’s not true just because a picture tells you.”

Caponigro was introduced to the possibilities of digital imaging as a boy, when his mother, graphic designer Eleanor Caponigro, was working on a book for photographer Eliot Porter. At the publisher’s, she took him into the Scitex computer room, where retouching was done on “million-dollar coloring books.”

“I wondered what would happen if an artist got ahold of these,” he said. “I didn’t realize it’d come along as soon as it did.”

Though his father, Paul Caponigro, is a renowned photographer, the younger Caponigro didn’t take up photography in earnest until college. He was busy with his own artistic pursuits: He studied painting at Yale and graduated from the University of California at Santa Cruz with a bachelor’s in art and literature.

“I had no idea I’d be a photographer,” he said. “I thought I’d be a painter.”

In 1989, Caponigro and his wife, Alexandra, a graphic designer, moved to Cushing. It was familiar territory – his father had taught for years at the Rockport Photographic Workshops, so he knew people in the area. Shortly after they arrived, Caponigro got involved with the Center for Creative Imaging in Camden.

There, he was able to play with the million-dollar coloring books he had seen in the 1970s, except they were Macintosh computers and they were available for a few thousand dollars. The technology profoundly changed his work as a painter and photographer, and he began to blend the two in his signature style.

“Because I’m modifying tone and proportion … I still consider what I do painting with photography,” Caponigro said. “This is nature photography and it’s art.”

He became a pioneer in the world of digital imaging, and in the decade or so that has passed since his first foray into the medium, he has gained international acclaim for his stark, almost painfully beautiful photo montages. His work has attracted the attention of commercial clients such as Epson, Canon, Imacon, Adobe, Kodak and Apple, but Caponigro also is highly respected in the fine-art world.

Of his work, New York Times reviewer Phyllis Braff wrote, “Adjustments to color and tone bring optically mesmerizing qualities to some works and heighten the emotional content in others. … A strong knowledge of painting is felt in the expansive desert spaces that are simultaneously deep and flat. There is a distant recall of Georgia O’Keeffe canvases, with each color area taking a precise role in creating the composition.”

O’Keeffe isn’t the only influence present in his photographs, which draw heavily from the landscapes of Maine and New Mexico. His seascapes reference Mark Rothko, a painter who Caponigro said “had a profoundly spiritual relationship with color – just color.” To achieve the atmospheric quality of his photographs, Caponigro turns to two less obvious muses: James Abbott McNeill Whistler and Joseph Turner.

But Caponigro’s most powerful influence isn’t an artist, it’s nature itself. He feels a deep responsibility to the Earth and is extremely mindful of the way in which he portrays it. While working on a recent series of wastelands, he was afraid of making them too beautiful. The experience brought to mind a conversation he had with Porter about a series of photographs of trash – if you make it too aesthetically pleasing, will people think it’s OK to litter?

“When there’s that convergence of social issues and aesthetic concerns and when it’s done so well … that dichotomy interests me,” Caponigro said. “You don’t see the ecological issue at first. You see that it’s beautiful.”

During an interview at Caponigro Arts, a state-of-the-art studio in the barn of his home, Caponigro spoke passionately and seriously about the environment. It is his hope that the photo montages, in their ideal portrayal of the natural world, will spark a dialogue about preservation and responsibility that transcends the art realm.

“We bring everything we have to bear in our entire life into our work,” he said. “Every year I do work that I don’t quite understand at the time. That’s part of the creative process. With really good work, you’re pushing to expand the boundaries.”

Caponigro Arts is located at 73 Cross Road in Cushing. For more information, call 354-0578 or visit www.johnpaulcaponigro.com.