A static picture cannot capture this qualitative growth. Seeing a “small” tumor and extracting it from the body does not guarantee our freedom from cancer—a fact that we still struggle to believe. In the end, a mammogram or a Pap smear is a portrait of cancer in its infancy. Like any portrait, it is drawn in the hopes that it might capture something essential about the subject—its psyche, its inner being, its future, its behavior. “All photographs are accurate,”780 the artist Richard Avedon liked to say, “[but] none of them is the truth.”
