We are on a search for the spiritually significant, the magic in every day. What will we find that’s worth passing down? What will we conjure?—Scott Alario

Photographer Scott Alario is based in Providence, Rhode Island. His series What We Conjure was made with an 8×10 view camera, and adds to the great lineage of photographers like Emmet Gowin and Nicholas Nixon who have documented those most dear to them. Alario explores his role as a father by making these pictures, occasionally appearing in them himself.

Alario has written a poem that serves as a fitting accompaniment to the images.

I don’t believe that the universe had a beginning, and nor will it have an end.
Both beginnings and ends speak of time, and time is a construct that will fail when our ability to communicate it does.

Energy moves in circles, time’s last moment stands closely to its first.
So how can it be said that we came to be, or came to be wondering about such things as the beginning of it all?

I saw you gain consciousness. It happened.
One day you weren’t, and then you were.
It was something about the sheen in your eyes, lasers:
that day they pierced me.

That’s how it must have been. One day there was just consciousness.
I like to think it was a family, all together at once, urgently, or it could have been a slowly building sense, an awareness growing a mutually shared question, or an endless list of questions.

We will live our lives wondering, and won’t ever know.
In wondering is joy, and wondering together is an ecstatic experience that makes the going in circles part seem worth it.

Feature Shoot Contributing Editor Matthew Leifheit is an independent writer, curator, and photographer based in New York City.