Beauty and The Breast

Thanks to my wonderful friend’s blog Losing The Boobs, I found this wonderful project. The photos are amazing. Here is what the Beauty and the Breast (click here to view the website) project is about:

Beauty and the Breast is a photography project showcasing powerful, provocative, and artistic images of women who have had mastectomies, to challenge and explore the role of breasts in relation to beauty and sexuality in modern culture.

The women in these portraits, by revealing this private and vulnerable side of themselves, are also exemplifying pluck and valor. Boldly proclaiming that they are no less beautiful or feminine as a result of cancer’s impact on their bodies. Cancer may have taken their breasts, but they will not let it strip away their spirit, or their joy, or their sexuality.

These images are purposed to reveal not only the physical outcome of mastectomy, but also to illustrate that a woman can still be and feel sexy with scars across her chest, or with one breast, or with no breasts at all. That beauty and breasts are not mutually exclusive. You can have one without the other.

Maybe these images give you hope and encouragement as you face your own surgery.

Maybe they help you understand some of the fears your partner, sister, friend, or coworker is grappling with.

Maybe the scars are difficult for you to look at. They are distressing for me, too. I am vexed that breast cancer persists on leaving it’s indelible mark on the lives of so many women.

Maybe seeing breasts with no nipples, or women with one breast, or with no breasts at all, is disturbing for you. I hope you are equally unsettled that breast cancer continues to have such an invasive impact on our lives and bodies.

I have seen that breast cancer often leaves a wake of mutilation, destruction, and fear.

Beauty and the Breast is a tribute to women who have walked this path. Strong, amazing, empowered women, whose scars are not tragic – but rather evidence of courage, of hard choices and heavy burdens, and of hope for what lies ahead. Women who are not victims of cancer, but celebrants of life.

Women in whom beauty prevails.

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