Art Myers American Photographer. Doctor specialised in preventative medicine. Born in 1930 www.artmyers.com Author of Winged Victory: Altered Images : Transcending Breast Cancer by Art Myers. Poetry by Maria Marrocchino. Photographic Gallery of Fine Art, San Diego. 1996.

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“Dora was 83 years old when I photographed her with her husband of six decades. When first asked if she would be a subject and pose seminude for this photographic project she replied immediately, “I will. I absolutely will. Nothing has changed in the past fifty years.”
What she meant, as she went on to explain, was that she still felt the sting of the social stigma of having had a mastectomy at age 35 and living with only one breast. She described later how a trusted family member warned her after surgery to never let her husband see the scar that signaled the absent breast. Dora’s heartfelt and disturbingly honest retort hardened my resolve to be totally open with my photographs in revealing scars and absent breasts. As both a photographer and a preventive medicine physician I know with certainty that the visual image can be a powerful tool in erasing erroneous stereotypes, improving behaviors and changing attitudes.
Occasionally someone will ask me, usually with distain, “Why would anyone wish to see photographs or paintings or sculptures of women with surgical scars and absent breasts?”
The answer, of course is that studying the images informs the viewer in a way that words alone fail to do. The viewer has the opportunity to see that the surgical scars are most often quite benign appearing and frequently almost invisible.
They learn that glimpsing a woman’s chest with a breast missing or reconstructed does not need to be disturbing and in fact quickly becomes comfortable and natural. Moreover, the viewer can experience the photographic subjects in the context of their other feminine characteristics as there is so much more to femaleness then just two perfect breasts. And furthermore, the viewer may also learn that loving relationships continue to exist between significant others after the ordeal of breast cancer. In other words the images can desensitize the viewer to what they had mistakenly imagined to be painful and difficult to visualize, and to ultimately help “destigmatize” the idea of missing or surgically operated and reconstructed breasts.

Numerous times breast cancer survivors or their loved ones have told me how much they were helped through the treatment ordeal by viewing my photographs. Many of these people had previously seen only those truncated, harshly lit and poorly photographed pictures of survivors from medical texts shown to them in the doctor’s clinic or hospital. I thought they deserved better.
So in completing this photographic project I purposely used traditional portrait and glamour lighting; showed many of the subjects with their partners; and illustrated scars and absent and rebuilt breasts in relationship to their other feminine characteristics.
I wanted the women to look more like they were photographed for a fashion magazine rather than for an anatomical textbook. After all, the women should not be seen as mere surgical specimens. They continue to be feminine beings that possess the same attributes of their female essence despite having survived breast cancer and its treatments. They yearn to be treated for who they are and not stigmatized for what they had or what they are missing. When people view my photographs I want them to see beyond the surgical results and to appreciate the women in the context of their relationships, there femaleness and the strength and perseverance that got them through the breast cancer experience.”

crédits