Vanessa, thirty-five, had three children with an abusive husband. She “lost her mind, started doing heroin”, after losing the children, who were taken away and given to her mother. The drugs led to homelessness and prostitution. She grew up on Arthur Avenue in the Bronx, but now spends her time in Hunts Point, “trying to survive everyday. Just doing whatever it takes”.

“With the traditional tapping-ritual, the Oktoberfest has been opened on saturday, September 22, 2012. Despite the rather wet weather on saturday, the first weekend was te xpeted sucess: Approximately 850.000 guests from Munich, Bavaria, the rest of Germany and from all over the world came to visit the 179th Oktoberfest on the opening weekend. About one million liters of beer and about nine oxen have already been sold”. – Oktoberfest.de. (Photo by ◊CHЄЄKY◊MINX◊PHOTO◊DIARY◊)

John and Edward Grimes of the band Jedward from Ireland peform at a dress rehearsal the day before the second semi-finals of the Eurovision Song Contest 2011 on May 11, 2011 in Duesseldorf, Germany. (Photo by Sean Gallup/Getty Images)

A park worker holds a monitor lizard at Lumpini park in Bangkok, Thailand, September 20, 2016. More than 400 of the Monitor lizards in the park will be caught by Thai authorities to relocate the reptile to a wildlife breeding center in the effort to control the creature population in the public park after the monitor lizard disturbing and causing several minor accident of people who jogging and cycling at the Lumpini Park. (Photo by Athit Perawongmetha/Reuters)

A group of fashionable nonagenarians pose for a photo in Pengzhou, Sichuan, China on October 12, 2016. (Photo by Rex Features/Shutterstock)

Kendall Jenner dazzles as the face of La Perla's feminist lingerie collection in Los Angeles, California on November 10, 2016. The 21-year-old model stars in a new campaign for the brand centered on “the liberation of every woman from the need to suffer for beauty”, reports Entertainment Tonight. La Perla released photos of Jenner and fellow models Isabeli Fontana and Liu Wen in its Spring 2017 collection on Instagram this week. (Photo by Splash News and Pictures)

A ring-tailed lemur sunbakes at Melbourne Zoo in Melbourne, Victoria, Australia on December 21 2016. (Photo by Julian Smith/EPA)

In this photo taken Friday, September 4, 2015, tourists Sarah and John Scott from Worcester, England, take a step back as a male silverback mountain gorilla from the family of mountain gorillas named Amahoro, which means “peace” in the Rwandan language, unexpectedly steps out from the bush to cross their path in the dense forest on the slopes of Mount Bisoke volcano in Volcanoes National Park, northern Rwanda. Deep in Rwanda's steep-sloped forest, increasing numbers of tourists are heading to see the mountain gorillas, a subspecies whose total population is an estimated 900 and who also live in neighboring Uganda and Congo, fueling an industry seen as key to the welfare of the critically endangered species as well as Rwanda's economy. (Photo by Ben Curtis/AP Photo)