Why photographers commit to long-term storytelling

Laurel and Howie Borowick are locked in an embrace. In the 2013 picture, the husband and wife look frail as they both battle terminal, stage-four cancers – pancreatic cancer for him, breast cancer for her.

Their daughter, Nancy, is standing only a few feet away, her face hidden by the camera. This photograph is just one of the many images Nancy Borowick made of her parents between 2009, when Laurel was diagnosed, and 2014, when she succumbed – almost one year to the day after Howie’s passing.

Borowick was still a student at the International Center of Photography in New York when she started photographing her parents. At that time, only her mother was sick and Borowick’s class project had a happy ending: Laurel’s cancer was in remission at the time.

Less than 18 months later, though, the cancer had reappeared and, as Borowick resumed her photographic work, her father also fell ill. Borowick has spent over five years documenting her family, as part of a long-term project that is still ongoing.

Her approach calls upon documentary photography’s age-old aspirations for in-depth storytelling – one that used to be the norm decades ago, when magazines and newspapers still had the budgets to send photographers on assignments for weeks or months at a time.

While the collapse of the traditional editorial market has made it difficult for photojournalists to spend more than a few days on a story, many of them remain steadfast in their commitment to long-term storytelling.

Sometimes it’s because they want to see the story through. Often, it’s because they know that time will bring depth, and depth will bring empathy and understanding from an audience that has grown immune to these feelings in an image-saturated world.

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