Outcome

by Jael Cooper
A recent photography assignment required me to wander the streets of Cagli in search of a reflection. I came across a gentleman washing his car who just so happened to have a distorted reflection of a building in combination with the upper half of his body thrown back upon my camera lens. As he already saw me with lens poised to shoot, in an attempt to actually take the picture, I pulled out my English to Italian dictionary. Both finding and pointing to the word reflection for him to read, he nodded his head in apparent understanding and gestured for me to take the picture. As I lifted the viewfinder to my eye he quickly pulled out the now very dirty bucket of water he had been using to wash his car and held it up to my lens. I discovered that despite sharing the word reflection we had two very different understandings of what my gesturing to his project meant. My inability to verbally explain my desire resulted in a nonverbal agreement in which both of us assumed a different outcome to be the result.