Nina Berman: An Autobiography of Miss Wish, over 25 years

An Autobiography of Miss Wish

The book tells the story of a survivor of sex trafficking whom Berman met by chance and began photographing in 1990, while the young woman was hustling for money and drugs on the streets of London. The two stayed in touch, and three years later, on the advice of Scotland Yard, Miss Wish — later known as Kimberly Stevens — left England for New York City and never returned.

The work follows her struggle to survive and to find physical and emotional safety, to assert herself as an artist and narrator, and to build a life while living with flashbacks, trauma and addiction. Photographed over twenty-five years across two cities, the story is told through multiple narrative elements, including the protagonist's own substantial personal archive, which the photographer safeguarded while acting as friend and advocate.

The resulting book weaves photographs together with an archive of extraordinary drawings depicting memories of crime scenes and abuse, alongside medical reports, diary entries, identity papers and text messages between photographer and subject. It was designed with Teun van der Heijden, and it is as much a record of two intertwined lives as it is a single biography.

Why the collaboration was the point

The introduction to the book was written by Tanya Habjouqa, who read it as an argument about the ethics of documentary practice rather than only as a story. Stevens takes an active role in her own account: her graphic illustrations run through the book as a personal diary, and her voice occupies the space alongside Berman's photographs and curated archival material.

That shared narration subverts the reductive division between photographer and subject, and the top-down storytelling it usually produces. Habjouqa's reading is that the book raises the ethical question of what photographers take from the people who open their lives to them, and answers it by giving the protagonist authority over her own portrayal — which is a different proposition from the more common gesture of sympathetic access.

Photographs in the book are credited to Berman and NOOR; the drawings are credited to Kimberly Stevens.

American militarism, trauma and resistance

Berman is a documentary photographer, filmmaker, author and educator whose work looks at American militarism, post-violence trauma, social injustice and resistance. Her photographs and videos have been exhibited at more than a hundred venues, including the Whitney Museum Biennial, the Museum of Fine Arts Houston and Dublin Contemporary.

She is the author of Purple Hearts – Back from Iraq, portraits and interviews with wounded American veterans, and of Homeland, an exploration of the militarisation of American life after September 2001. Her work has been recognised with awards in both art and journalism from the World Press Photo Foundation, Pictures of the Year International, the Open Society Foundation, the New York Foundation for the Arts, the Aftermath Project and Hasselblad.

She was the inaugural Susan Tifft fellow at the Center for Documentary Studies at Duke University in 2017, is a member of NOOR Images, and is an associate professor at the Columbia University Graduate School of Journalism in her home city of New York.

Set against the rest of Berman's output, Miss Wish clarifies what holds the practice together. Purple Hearts and Homeland are both, in different registers, studies of what violence leaves behind after the cameras that recorded the violence itself have moved on — the wounded veteran at home, the security state absorbed into ordinary life. Miss Wish applies the same patience to a single person, over a span longer than most photographic careers. Twenty-five years is not a duration a photographer plans; it accumulates, one decision at a time, out of the refusal to let a story end at the point where it stops being publishable. That the material eventually included the safeguarding of the subject's own archive — the drawings, the medical reports, the papers — shows how far past photography the commitment ran, and the book's shared authorship is the honest accounting of it.