Slide Show

Living With Cancer Susan Gubar writes about life with ovarian cancer.

In the documentary “Baring it All,” a young woman declares, “The scar represents everything I’ve been through. I’m proud of what I’ve been through.” The film focuses on the fashion photographer David Jay, who created a pictorial series about breast cancer called “The Scar Project.”

The photos from “The Scar Project” strike me as raw and beautiful. Not beautiful like the post-mastectomy pose of the artist Matuschka, whose “Beauty Out of Damage” photo became iconic after appearing on the cover of The New York Times Magazine in 1993. By comparison, David Jay’s portraits contain images of women whose bared breasts look crumpled, concave, synthetic, reconstructed without or with reconfigured nipples, stitched horizontally or vertically or at an acute angle, lumpy, lopsided, wounded, or hacked off.

Bravery resides there, beauty elsewhere, in these shots of topless women in their 20s and 30s — in a wary smile, a cocked hat and suspenders, the branching veins of an inner arm, a mystic tattoo on a lower back, resolute hands on hips, smudged make-up smeared by a tear, an abundantly pregnant belly. Often beauty radiates from the eyes of the subject whose proud gaze conveys a steadfast determination to confront a grotesque turn of events with fortitude.

The ones that grip me stare at the photographer — at me — defiant. They want to live. I want them to live. Like Barbara Ehrenreich, David Jay seeks to unsettle a “public anesthetized by pink ribbons and fluffy teddy bears.”

Cancer and its treatments challenge our perceptions of beauty. Without hair and breasts, some of the photographed young women had trouble feeling pretty and feminine. Some felt more beautiful and womanly because they realized their strength. All volunteered to participate in the project to help others confronting a cancer diagnosis and to raise awareness about the number of young adults dealing with the disease.

A scar on one woman, “Michaela,” travels from her bellybutton down toward taut black briefs. She has dealt with mastectomies and reconstruction as well as the sort of gynecological cancer that afflicts me. At the end of the volume, she writes about her fate: “never being able to bear more children,” “never being sexually aroused,” “forever loosing the feeling in my breasts,” and “always wondering if one or both cancers will reappear.”

The last plate in David Jay’s book is a black rectangle dedicated to “Jennifer,” as is the entire volume. Jennifer Buffaloe had wanted to participate in the project, but grew too weak from metastases in her liver. She died in 2009 at the age of 27.

Because of the documentary and the book, I force myself to look at my body. There are lumps, bumps, thickened lines, deep indents, purplish bruises and permanent protrusions in unglamorous places. If I cannot bring myself to go into specifics here, I certainly would never have the nerve to bare myself before a camera. This fact underscores for me the valor of the young women in “The Scar Project.”

The youthfulness of David Jay’s subjects wrenches me. Unlike them, I had a good span of my adult life — more than 60 years — before treatment. Their bodies stopped being their own too soon. Did their selves also stop being their own too soon? Cancer scars are physical mutilations of and on the body; but, more than that, cancer scars the psyche, the soul, the spirit. The “me” before cancer is not the “me” after cancer. Nor can these identities always be sutured.

A number of people regretfully recall the “me” before cancer as ungrateful for an intact body, taking for granted organs that functioned normally, arrogant about the boons of health, ignorant of the preciousness of life. But I remember the “me” before cancer nostalgically. My earlier self could teach and connect with family, friends and students spontaneously and lavishly. At times I visualize the diagnosis as a gun aimed at a flying bird — pitched down from the sky in an instant to lie fluttering on the ground (or, to be more literal, the blue couch).

From my perspective, the young women in “The Scar Project” were gunned down while just trying their wings. With courage, the wounded survivors bear invisible scar tissue beneath the physical scars of cancer: the haunting lost person each might have become, had it not been for the disease. They live, but not the lives they would have led.