Gelatin silver print Provided by the artist - Mark Cohen On the street I saw the woman and I got close to her and then saw the pin on her coat. I was using a 28mm lens and had it racked out to its maximum closeness. 28 inches' This is somthing I always did because I want to get very close to the people in the pictures. This is pretty easy to do on a crowded street. There is a safety in numbers. I saw the sailor pin and it must be, I think now, a picture of her son, I was too close for it to catch focus,even at f.22 but the pin, overexposed as it is seems to make a ghostly part of the image and I like the picture that has resulted. The chin and the neck and the pearls and the white blouse fragment under the coat all conspire to 'make' this intimate picture, The 'meaning' is still unclear.
[Mark Cohen to Alan Griffiths, pers. email, 13 Nov 2011]
