Breast Cancer

Fifteen thousand new cases of breast cancer are diagnosed in Spain every year. One in ten women in Europe and North America suffer from this illness at some point in their lives. Despite the huge number of women affected and the thousands of women all over the world diagnosed as having breast cancer, the subject is little mentioned in public. Many women live in isolation, shame leading them to hide their illness and its consequences such as, for example, mastectomy.

In this project I took photographs of 22 women I found through short advertisements in the Berlin press. I did not select them, but accepted them by order of phoning, as I wanted to allow all those women who wished to take part to do so, whatever their physique.
In this way, I built up a work comprising photographs of women between the ages of 25 and 63 years who had undergone operation, who had been "mastectomised" of one or both breasts, with or without mammary reconstruction, with or without prosthesis. 
I produced the photographs in intimate collaboration with the women. I wanted to portray them just as they wished to show and present themselves to the camera and the public. There were no rules or norms in this study except that of allowing the women to pose just as they wanted to present themselves and to be presented in society. The exhibition therefore shows their different personalities with their contradictions, fears, insecurity and anguish, but also their strength, their fight, their vanity, their beauty and their pride, challenging typical images of women.
By taking part in the project, these women show the absurdities of traditional codes of visual representation, which consider them as passive victims of their illness. This exhibition shows them to be active subjects calling on society to give some thought to their situation, radically and consciously breaking with our culture's image of beauty.
The portraits were made from 10.16 x 12.7 cm format negatives.

Katharina Mouratidi

Patrocina: Caja Madrid. Obra social
Sponsors:  El País i Ràdio 4
Collaborate:  Schilling 

Grup Àgata (suport a afectades pel càncer de mama)