Just before breast cancer survivor Aniela McGuinness went through with her double mastectomy, she turned to the Internet for before-and-after photos of other patients who had undergone the same surgery.
After the photos she discovered left her feeling unsettled, she decided to reinvent the mastectomy photo. McGuinness documented her experience with a photo series that follows her from pre-surgery through the reconstruction process.
"I wanted a photo that captured how I felt," she wrote in a blog post. "So I decided to do a photo series that would express the emotion in each stage of the process."
She enlisted the help of Blast 'Em Photography, which quickly signed on to help document her process. The resulting photos, she writes, capture the "evolution, the life and the humor" in her situation.
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