Picturing Incidence (Clara Jacobi 1689; Stromae 2015)

Faces of real men and women standing for the difficult conversations they had to have are the main visual trope of a 2010 French campaign, encouraging friends, family members, and coworkers to talk about breast cancer screening. There is nothing particularly remarkable about that structure of address unless one remembers that fifty years earlier, the public image of cancer in posters endorsed by the French Ministry of Health consisted mostly of allegorical formulas: a four-headed hydra slayed by a floating sword, a giant crab crushed by a disembodied fist or a spear that came from nowhere, and stylized silhouettes of warriors waging an invisible war. Vignette 5 investigates what it means and what it takes to put a face on cancer in the epidemiological present.