Amazing, Powerful Photographs
Posted 9/14/2011
Posted in
This is about a photography exhibit, Amazons: Homage to Women of Strength, that is currently being displayed in Austria and Germany. I want to buy a plane ticket immediately and see them. The reference, of course, is to Amazon women who removed one breast ( and remember that this was long before general anesthesia) in order to more powerfully hold and use their bows. I am including the start of an article about this project from The Wall Street Journal and then a link to read more and see the photographs. Please take a few minutes and look at these.
It wasn't until after the chemotherapy, the hair loss and the scars across her chest from a recent mastectomy that Uta Melle decided to pose naked before the camera.
"Battling breast cancer is a moment in which you feel only weaker and weaker, until you look in the mirror one day and say to yourself 'There's no way to feel emptier than this,'" says the 42-year-old Ms. Melle. "You feel raw and empty."
Three months after her diagnosis in April 2009, the German mother of two sat for a series of portraits with photographer Jackie Hardt to capture her feeling of "blankness."
Ms. Melle's own mother had died of breast cancer just two days after she received her diagnosis—and only 20 minutes before Ms. Melle's 40th birthday. "I had to bury her as quickly as I could so I could begin my own treatment."
One of the photos from that session—depicting a frail Ms. Melle wearing only soft, white wings over her paper-thin skin, her smile a mixture of weariness and joy—is part of "Amazons: Homage to Women of Strength," a new exhibition traveling across Germany and Austria.
The 60 color portraits and black-and-white nudes depict 19 women, including Ms. Melle, in various stages of breast cancer.
http://online.wsj.com/article/SB10001424053111904716604576546262803924624.html
or
http://tinyurl.com/68kub8o
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