One of industrial life's strange traditions is the pinup calendar that shows nubile young women posing provocatively around tractor parts and turbines. Eizo, a maker of medical-imaging technology, decided to promote its wares with this updated version: The models are wearing shoes and nothing else. Not even flesh. They're X-Rays.

Whether it sells more flat-panel monitors or not, the calendar, created by the German ad agency Butter, is pretty interesting. The associations triggered by those familiar Playboyish poses—uncomplicated sex and living large—meld curiously with the glowing-bones imageryof hospitals, airport surveillance and death. The skeletons are humanized by their high heels and arched backs; the models' postures, in turn, now seem close kin to the positions patients take in colonscopies, bypasses and other medical situations. If it were in a gallery, we'd have no trouble calling it art.

Wonder how they got the shoes to show up so well.