Published by, Kehrer Heidelberg Berlin, 2017, Hardcover, Exact specifications unknown.

New

An Autobiography of Miss Wish

An Autobiography of Miss Wish is a project told in photographs, drawings, videos, texts and documents which explores the life of a survivor of sex trafficking and child pornography whom I met randomly while she was a teenager living on the streets in London in 1990. Three years later, she landed on my doorstep in New York City, having fled London on the advice of Scotland Yard.

The work documents her escape, her struggle to survive and assert herself despite enormous fear, to craft a life while living in a state of flashbacks, trauma and addiction and to navigate the contemporary world of American psychiatric and criminal institutions as a black woman.

The story is told through my photographs and her archive, which I collected and safeguarded over the years.. The archive includes her drawings, diary entries, psychiatric reports, ID cards, hand written letters, suicide notes, and text messages.

The work, created from 1990 – 2016 and shot in England and New York, is also a work about our life together, and the process of making unique collaborative documentary work on a subject prone to cliché and stereotyping. – Nina Berman