Husband wears pink tutu for cancer awareness
WHITE PLAINS — When Bob Carey’s wife was diagnosed with breast cancer, he did something unusual: He took a bunch of photos of himself wearing just a pink tutu.
There he was, a burly, hairy man balancing on the edge of Hessian Lake in Bear Mountain State Park, contemplating the fall colors in Harriman State Park, hanging onto the side of the Kensico Dam in Valhalla. Always in just his pink tutu. It was a little escapism, Carey acknowledges, but the photographs had a purpose: They made his wife, Linda, and her fellow cancer patients laugh during treatments. But why a tutu?
“This is the kind of guy he is. He is an artist. He takes care of things through his art,” says Linda Carey, who was diagnosed with breast cancer in 2003. “During my treatment, anything he could take to make me laugh was worth it.”
“The images were a little humorous and maybe a little reflective of what they were going through,” says Bob Carey of the photos that Linda’s fellow patients soon began sharing.
In the 14 years since he began shooting his tutu photos, Bob and his pink companion — he is on his fifth one — have evolved into a global phenomenon.
The Careys have published a book of photographs called “Ballerina,” and four tutu calendars. With the net proceeds, the couple created the Tutu Project, a breast cancer non-profit that raises funds for women, men and their families to ease the financial burdens that come with breast cancer diagnoses.
The couple have traveled all over for the photos, from the Grand Canyon and Statue of Liberty to Medellin, Colombia; Newport Beach, Calif., and Munich, Germany. What are the logistics of setting up his shots, rigging a tripod, stripping down to his tutu, and then posing, sometimes in crowded places like the subway or a village square?
“Normally, if it’s in the winter, I wear jeans, pink ladies bike shorts — basically a size too small and then depending on where I am, I wear flip flops; I can pop out of them,” he says. “I just take my shirt off and shoot. In the warmer months, I am very American; I usually wear cargo shorts.”