While I was walking back from an interview downtown this afternoon, I came across a group of people gathered around a recent graduate, crowned with laurels. As I was lowering my camera, a man from the graduation party approached me with a large Nikon and asked if I would take their picture. Naturally, I agreed, and then took a few with my own camera. We began talking, and they invited me to walk with them.

It was interesting to see how my camera shaped my encounter with the party. Because I speak almost no Italian, I did not feel obliged to make small talk with the people, and after a few jokes and thank-yous, they continued with their noisemakers and songs as if I was not there. Once we got to the place where they were having their aperitivo—a park overlooking the city of Urbino—they asked me to join them under the tent, offered me drinks and food, and gave me a place at the head picnic table, with the mother and father and some other friends/family members of the graduate. At first, I felt terribly out of place, like an imposter in their private celebration. How would it look when all the photos of their son’s graduation had a random American girl in the background squinting through the lens of a point-and-shoot camera?

But when I made to stand up from the table to make room, the mother of the grad waved me back and pressed me with more sweets. She spoke a little English, and made me welcome with it, but even when our mutual language resources were exhausted, the silence felt comfortable and open. Soon she had resumed her conversation in Italian with the others, and I resumed my photography. From behind the lens, I became aware of interactions I would have missed if I had been attending verbally to one person across a table. The composition of a photograph became a way of listening to body language, and the need to look for new visual angles led me toward interactions and scenes I would not normally have noticed. And whether because they were at a graduation party or because they were Italian, the people did not seem at all inhibited by the presence of my camera.

After food and drink had been consumed, presents opened, and coffee served, and once I was pretty sure I had taken the same picture of the graduate pouring drinks at least a hundred times, I took my leave and thanked them for letting me stay with them. After giving me an energetic invitation to the birthday party for one of the graduate’s friends, the group—grandmother, girlfriend, and all—waved Ciao.