I’ve spent most of my life learning to pay attention.

Years of it in the wilderness, studying tracking: the discipline of reading ground, weather, birdsong, the small deviations that tell you what happened here and what’s about to. A decade of it in fine dining, where everything is noticed or everything fails. Some of it at a pool table, some of it in a fermentation bucket, a fair amount of it in front of a glowing terminal, and a good while now spent watching my own child grow, which is a whole thing of its own. Photography has been there through all of it, since the darkroom days, black and white, wound by hand.

All of it was the same pursuit: connection. Knowing a thing, whether a trail, a table, or a person, well enough to see when it shows you something true.

That’s what a sitting with me is. The lights and the lenses are just how I take notes.

Carl Payne · Knox County, Ohio · sittings by inquiry