Side by Side, Battling Cancer and Sending Off the Bride
By MICHAEL WINERIP
When I caught up with Nancy Borowick on Thursday morning, she was running around East Harlem shooting a neighborhood feature for AM New York, a free newspaper distributed in the subways. Earlier this week, she worked fund-raisers for a charter school and a humanitarian relief organization. She is 28, a freelance photographer, and often rises at 6 a.m. to call assignment editors at newspapers around the city looking for day work — a politician campaigning, a news conference by the mayor, a good perp walk.
After getting married Oct. 5, she went right back to work. “This is how I spent my honeymoon,” she says.
Like a lot of young photographers, she supports herself doing what pays, and she finds time in between to shoot the projects she went into photography for. The photos featured today on Lens hit very close to home — in fact, many were shot in her family home in Westchester County over the last four years. They tell the story of her parents’ battle with cancer. Her mother, Laurel, a lawyer who stayed at home to anchor their family of five, learned she had breast cancer in 1997. She was then healthy for a decade.
But the cancer returned in the fall of 2009, and after treatment and another 18 months of good health, it reappeared, in the fall of 2011. This time the disease was more virulent and by January 2013 had spread to her brain.
Ms. Borowick’s father, Howie, a personal injury lawyer, was healthy until December 2012, when he was told he had pancreatic cancer, which has a survival rate of about 1 in 5 after a year.
She began photographing her mother for a span from September 2009 to June 2010, during the time when her mother relapsed, until the cancer was in remission. The photos were done as a project for a class at the International Center for Photography, taken during weekly visits home. Many of those photos include her father, who was then healthy, supporting her mother.
Today’s photos were mostly taken during a second stretch, starting last winter, after the diagnosis of her father’s cancer. This time, there are photos of the two of them getting chemotherapy together and her mother caring for her father. Whenever Nancy goes home to visit, she has a camera slung over her shoulder.
For both parents, it was an awful case of history repeating itself. Laurel Borowick watched her father die of the same pancreatic cancer that is killing her husband. When Howie Borowick was 15, his mother died of the same breast cancer his wife now battles.
Nancy had planned to be married in the spring of 2014, but because her parents are so ill and she was determined to have them walk her down the aisle, she moved it up to October. One of the many tensions she dealt with over the last six months was whether her mother and father would make it to the wedding.
She and Kyle Grimm, a corporate lawyer, were married on a perfect fall afternoon bathed in Geographic light, as some of the guests, who were also photographers, noted.
Being a photographer to the core, she even shot parts of the wedding herself.
A few hours before the ceremony, Nancy had climbed up a tree, putting a camera with a remote about 25 feet above the ground. The view was directly behind Nancy and Kyle. During the ceremony, a friend, the photographer Jessica Earnshaw, assisted her and set off the remote as Nancy was walked down the aisle by both her parents.
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