Battling Breast Cancer as a family of photographers

After a two-year long distance relationship, photographers Jordan and Anna Rathkopf married at Brooklyn City Hall in 2007. Anna left her hometown of Prague just three days earlier, and was dazzled by it all. ​“It felt like a scene from a movie,” she remembers.

At the courthouse, the city clerk stood in front of a large American flag, and began the ceremony. ​“When we reached the part about [in sickness and in health]’, the clerk grew animated,” Jordan remembers. ​“She looked me straight in the eyes and said, ​‘You better be good to her.’”

The two laughed in appreciation of Brooklyn’s finest making it plain, not knowing their fates would put this vow to the test in 2016 when Anna found a lump in her breast on her 37^th birthday.

“We had just started talking about having a second child,” she remembers. ​“One day, we were discussing another baby, and the next day, I was hearing about my survival probability rates. I was young, with no family history, and suddenly, I was sitting in a doctor’s office, being told I had an aggressive cancer. It felt like I was thrown into a black pit.”

The day after they got the diagnosis, Anna and Jordan picked up their cameras and set to work, their shared love of photography now a tool for survival. Together they embarked on a journey that would become their debut monograph, HER2: The Diagnosed, The Caregiver, and Their Son (Daylight Books).

HER2 is a love story in the most devotional sense, not just between husband and wife, but also between artist and audience. With global cancer rates rising 79% among people under 50 over the past 30 years, and the United States on track to set a record breaking 2 million new cancer cases this year, many are experiencing what Anna has lived, needing to feel seen, supported, and understood.

“The day after Anna’s diagnosis, we decided to document our experience,” Jordan says. ​“It made everything that mattered most in life suddenly clear. There were moments when the love I felt was so profound it was hard to put into words. It was a similar intensity to what I felt when I first held our son — a deep, pure love, unlike anything I’d experienced before.”

For Anna, every picture started to carry enormous meaning. ​“I worried that my son might not remember how much I loved him so I began creating memories for him and for Jordan,” she says. ​“At the same time, every time I looked in the mirror, I didn’t recognise myself. The photos began to serve as a stamp of reality. It was proof that this happening to me. It wasn’t just a nightmare.”

As they began to share their photographs, a powerful transformation took hold and what had been a lonely, terrifying journey through trauma began to heal through community, connection, and conversations that needed to be seen in order to be felt and heard.

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