Graduation Day, Side by Side
Four years at Cal State Fullerton, and the friend who was there for all of it.
Written by Gregory Ferraro for GF Creative House BlogPhotographed by Gregory Ferraro and Leah Korenberg (@leahkorenberg_)
I graduated with my camera around my neck. It wasn’t meant as a statement. It was just the most natural way I knew how to be there.
“For four years, looking through a lens was how I made sense of the place, and I didn’t want to stop on the day it was ending.”
Most of college happens in pieces. A semester is a stack of deadlines, a year is a handful of projects and it’s hard to feel the shape of any of it while you’re inside it. Graduation is one of the few days that asks you to see it all at once. I wasn’t sure I could, so I did what I always do. I started taking pictures.
Class of 2026
Portraits around campus before graduation. Photographed by Leah Korenberg (@leahkorenberg_).
The person next to me
Going back through the day afterward, the same face kept showing up beside mine. Leah (@leahkorenberg_) and I have been best friends since seventh grade. We went through Walker Junior High together, then Kennedy High School, where we led the yearbook side by side, and then, somehow, into the same college.
Friendships from home are supposed to fade once college starts. Ours didn’t fade. It changed shape. Some semesters we were working on the same things, and some we were simply in the same building, heading in different directions. Either way, she was never far, and there is a kind of comfort in growing up next to someone who remembers every version of you.
Before
Getting ready, and the first photos of the day.
What four years feels like
When people ask what college was like, I usually answer with a list. But a list isn’t really what it was. It was learning, slowly, what kind of storyteller I want to be. It was realizing that what I care about most are the people behind the work, and that the best way I know to honor them is to pay close attention.
I turned my cap into a collage of those years, and walking in, it felt a little like carrying all of it at once. By the time the ceremony was over, it just felt like mine.
During
Commencement, from the rows of caps to the field.
The ones who came
Graduation is loud and crowded and over faster than you expect. What stays with you are the faces: family, friends and the people who carried you further than they probably know.
Destiny Morris’ family came too, holding a portrait of her. Standing with them on the field, I felt how much of the day belonged to people who weren’t walking in it. Some people are remembered in words. I’m grateful she was remembered there, in a crowd full of people celebrating what comes next.
After
Family, friends and a slower afternoon together.
Side by side
We finished junior high together. We finished high school together. And on May 20, we got to graduation alongside each other one more time. I don’t know what the next chapter looks like yet.
“I just hope we keep showing up in each other’s pictures.”
Graduation on Instagram