Death Row Inmates Are Making Art. Would You Buy It?

Nicola White didn’t leave her heart in San Francisco, she left it in the San Quentin State Prison, just over the Golden Gate Bridge. “It’s funny,” she tells us by phone from her native England, “I never set out thinking, ‘I’m going to Death Row and I’m going to start a project with these prisoners…

But Did You Hear about France’s Most Infamous Madam?

With the Jeffrey Epstein scandal creeping its way into every late night dinner table conversation and the sordid secrets of his mysterious Madam, Ghislaine Maxwell, slowly unfolding in the press, it wasn’t long before we would be talking about “Madame Claude”. France’s own high society brothel queen, aka. Fernande Grudet, reigned for decades as one…

Documenting a Stasi Prison

On East German maps of the time, the prison simply didn’t exist, marked only with a blank space. After the fall of the Berlin Wall, unlike many other government and military institutions in East Germany, the former prison was not stormed by demonstrations, allowing the authorities to destroy evidence of what went on there. Twenty…

The Secret Newspaper Published from inside a Prison

Doftana Prison sits abandoned near Romania’s Carpathian mountains. Its foundations have been rocked by earthquakes, its roofs have been brought down by heavy snow and storms, and every winter the building crumbles a little more. There is still enough remaining to show the scale of the place and a sense of how a prisoner’s life was,…

This Italian Prison has its own Designer Restaurant

When you are looking for somewhere to go out for dinner a prison probably isn’t the first place you would think of. However, this unique restaurant may change your mind… Located inside the largest prison in Piedmont, Italy, Casa Circondariale Lorusso e Cutugno, with over 1300 inmates, ‘Liberamensa’, which literally translates to “free canteen,” offers…

Buried by Nature: The Dark Colonial Past of Jungle Book Island

It has become one with the jungle since the last human inhabitants abandoned its shores in World War II. Ross Island, or as I’ve come to call it, “Jungle Book Island”, was once referred to as the “Paris of the East”, for its opulent architecture and exciting social life amidst the unlikely setting of a tropical island…

The Babes of Sydney’s Criminal Past

Femme Fatales and Devious Divas were the ruling forces of Sydney’s underbelly during the 1920’s. These convicted ladies knew how to get into trouble in the most fashionable ways possible. Posing for their mug shots, they came dressed to the nines in furs, pearls, stylish hats and sassy drop-waist frocks. Even if they were being…

Death Row Inmates Are Making Art. Would You Buy It?

But Did You Hear about France’s Most Infamous Madam?

Documenting a Stasi Prison

The Secret Newspaper Published from inside a Prison

This Italian Prison has its own Designer Restaurant

Buried by Nature: The Dark Colonial Past of Jungle Book Island

The Babes of Sydney’s Criminal Past

INSTAGRAM

messynessychic

CATEGORIES

LINKS

INSTAGRAM

messynessychic