Picturing Survivors

Megan Eatman — Thu, 14 Oct 2010 16:43:48 +0000

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.

Image: David Jay, The SCAR Project

SCAR stands for "Surviving Cancer: Absolute Reality," and the images the project produces clearly offer a counter to the disembodied pink ribbon. SCAR's strategy is not entirely new; campaigns raising awareness for other issues have often used images of injured or otherwise physically affected individuals to further their cause. These images, however, avoid falling into overwhelmingly sentimental appeals to pity, guilt, or shock. The women pictured are self-selected, volunteers who chose to show their bodies to help fight breast cancer. While absent or reconstructed breasts may be shocking to some viewers, the comfort that the composition projects steers the images away from pure shock value. Looking directly into the camera without fear or shame, these women do not seem to need help; rather, with knowing expressions, they are here to help you.

Gathering support for a cause is difficult, and I certainly wouldn't discount the effect that pink ribbons have had on breast cancer awareness. However, the SCAR project seems an important counter to "thinking pink." At the nexis of tragedy and hope, these images seem to balance between the incessant positivity that Barbara Ehrenreich critiques in Bright-Sided and an apocalyptic sadness. These women are survivors, but they aren't unharmed; getting better and being strong does not have to (and often should not) mean hiding the marks of what happened to you. That complex message, spelled out with these women's bodies, may not always be apparent in the more common iconography of breast cancer.

The importance of what cannot be seen

Jillian Sayre — Tue, 09 Oct 2007 18:14:21 +0000

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.

For me, the story has a few important intersections for the student/scholar of visual rhetoric. The need for the tattoo demonstrates the importance the visual representation of the body to even the most intimate of its observers. Without the nipple, the breast could seem incomplete, or even still sick. Even though it is just a "drawing," the tattoo brings presence back to the breast, or wholeness back to the subject. The nipple, similar to the increasingly popular inside-of-lip tattoo, therefore constructs an intimate or private language, an idea that is not frequently attached with the hyper-visibility of a lot of body modifications.

I also think that this is interesting in terms of the rhetoric of body modification itself, that is often thought to be reclaim the body for the subject. If cancer can make the patient feel that the body is not her own, taken over, invaded by the cancer itself, then this act of modification could serve as a ritual "taking-back" or assertion of ownership and control.
Last, I just want to point out the strange relationship between health and sickness for body modification. As Victoria Pitts points out in her book In the Flesh, body modification is often surrounded by the discourse of mutilation, perversion, self-harm and other ways of designating the body modifier as "sick" - with this new form of tattoo it is the body modification that tries to approximate "healthy" according to normative standards. In this way does the nipple reconstruction actually undermine the destabilization project that many body modifiers understand themselves to participate in?

viz. - breast cancer

Picturing Survivors

The importance of what cannot be seen