Für Mich (For Myself).

You Taught Me How to Be a Butterfly Only So You Could Break My Wings. Photographs by Sina Niemeyer.

Ceiba Editions, with The Photobook Museum (Köln), Siena, Italy, 2018. English, 80 pp., 40 color illustrations, 5½x7½".

Für mich is the artist’s autobiographic story of sexual abuse. Sina’s project was born out of the necessity to understand and come to terms with what had happened to her as a pre-adolescent girl. To ultimately get to a place of forgiveness, in order to be able to close a chapter that hurt her so much, and influenced how she grew up to become a young woman.

With photography as therapy, the book itself is meant to serve as a tool for social change. It is small in size, but very dense in content. It is not a book with pretty pictures, it is not meant as an accusation of one specific person, it addresses the multiple and contradicting emotions a sexually abused person feels, where there is no clear black and white, but with all the shades of grey.

When every 3rd woman has or will experience physical and/or sexual intimate partner violence or non-partner sexual violence in her life, then there is something wrong with society. It is our responsibility that a change happens.

As a society we must take care of our children, we must make sure that, if something wrong happens to them, they have a place to go, that they can talk to someone and that they are taken seriously by doing so, that it does not take up to 8 attempts before a child is heard.

And we must not only make it easier for children and women, but also for the potential abusers, to protect themselves and others, to recognise their wrong longings early enough and to find help more easily.

Sina’s and our hope is that this book will start a conversation.

Text in English, with French, German, Italian, and Spanish translations.

Handbound publication with a transparent cover.

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