viz.

October is breast cancer awareness month, so you may be seeing pink ribbons and products more frequently. While the pink ribbon is a powerful symbol of breast cancer awareness, "pinkwashing" (exploiting consumer grief or guilt to sell products, such as pink hair dryers or nail polish, with minimal donations to breast cancer organizations) has been the target of much critique, in part because it allows consumers to feel that consumption of material goods is a solution to a widespread health problem. The SCAR project, which takes and exhibits photographs of young breast cancer survivors, offers a different visual argument for cancer awareness. Depending on your office environment, the images after the jump may be NSFW.

I'm not quite sure how to write about this for Viz., but when I found out about it, I thought it was important to think about in terms of the limits, possibilities, and intimacies of visual rhetoric.

A tattoo artist in NYC recently wrote to Mod Blog about her first job drawing in the nipple and areola for a mastectomy patient. The entry, titled "Rx Tattoo," describes how a surgeon contacted the artist to supplement the work of reconstructive surgery.