“HER2: Alone Together” Featured At Photoville Festival in NYC

June 7-22nd, 2025

Emily Warren Roebling Plaza - Brooklyn Bridge Park

HER2: Alone, Together is an autobiographical visual narrative by photographers Anna and Jordan Rathkopf, exploring how illness reshapes identity, intimacy, and family. When Anna was diagnosed with breast cancer at 37, the couple began photographing their lives—capturing not just the realities of treatment, but the invisible emotional labor of caregiving and survivorship.

At the heart of this work is Anna’s raw self-representation and the world around her. Her portraits challenge the passivity often projected onto patients, asserting her agency as both subject and storyteller. Jordan’s photographs offer a counterpoint, shaped by the quiet toll of caregiving—the expectation to stay strong, the silence around male vulnerability, and the emotional cost of withholding fear to protect others.

Our son, Jesse, offers a third gaze—his drawings, photographs, and quiet observations reveal how children absorb the emotional weight of illness in ways that adults often overlook. His presence threads the story together, reminding us that caregiving is not just spousal—it is a family experience.

Spanning seven years and shaped by Anna’s experience as an immigrant, patient, and mother navigating U.S. healthcare, HER2: Alone, Together invites viewers to consider illness not as an individual burden, but as a deeply shared experience—of diagnosis and caregiving, isolation and connection, fear and fierce love.

The project has recently been featured in The Washington Post, STAT, and on several major platforms for visual storytelling, helping spark conversations about fertility loss, the emotional cost of survivorship, and the weight of silence in families navigating care.