Pigeons of War and their Double Decker Buses

To me, one of the greatest miracles/ mysteries of nature is the homing pigeon. No matter how many times someone tries to explain it to me, I still can’t quite grasp why or how those birds manage to find their way home from such long distances. To further fuel my intrigue, today I came across…

The Real “No-Go Zone” of France: A Forbidden No Man’s Land Poisoned by War

When you imagine France and its scenic countryside, you might think of the picturesque villages, vineyards a plenty and endless rolling green hills to drive through on a blissful summer road trip. But there’s one corner of this scenic country that no one has been allowed to enter for nearly a century, known as the “Zone Rouge” (the red zone).…

47 Days to Leave their Village and Never Return

An eviction notice is never the kind of letter you want to receive, but in 1943, the villagers of Imber, on Salisbury Plain, Wiltshire, all received the very same letter, regretting to inform them “that it is necessary to evacuate” their home to be “made available for training by December 17th”, giving them just 47 days to…

When Paris Invited both the Nazis and Soviets to its 1937 World Expo

World War II wouldn’t break out for another two years, the Nazis wouldn’t invade Paris and hang Swastika flags all over town for another few. In 1937, the International Exposition dedicated to Art and Technology in Modern Life brought together 44 countries in the city of light, allies and enemies alike… In the vast online…

The Congo Airport Playground

Some people’s instagram accounts are full of cat pictures or fashion selfies or cupcakes. And then there’s the instagram account of photographer Michael Christopher Brown, who hangs out with Congolese kids in airplane graveyards. From the looks of his instagram photos, Michael hasn’t been back home to Brooklyn in years. His profile is a continuously stunning feed of raw and intimate glimpses into a world…

Crumbling Communist Murals the Soviets Left Behind

In the early nineties, well after the destruction of the Berlin Wall, did you know there were still over 300,000 Soviet soldiers in Eastern Germany? In 1991, there were still 4,200 Russian tanks, 690 aircrafts, 180 rocket systems and over 200,000 civil employees and relatives of officers, among them about 900,000 children. Until the final withdrawal…

Up Close & Personal with Coco Chanel in her Apartment at the Ritz

The most controversial years in Coco Chanel’s life were spent living at the Hotel Ritz in Paris. While most of Paris was being booted out of their homes during the German occupation, Coco lived in luxury throughout most of World War II– thanks to a highly questionable relationship with her lover, a German Aristocrat and Nazi…

Windows of War: How Parisians Prepared for Attack

For seven straight days in September 1914, Paris became a World War I battleground as German pilots dropped 50 bombs on the city during the First Battle of the Marne. Notre Dame Cathedral was damaged and notes were dropped alongside the bombs demanding the immediate surrender of Paris and the French nation. How do you go about…

Style Queens of 1960s Saigon

I was going through a giant archive of old photographs (yes another one), mostly taken by Westerners over in Vietnam during the war, when I started to develop a very unexpected style crush. Who knew Mod fashion made it to 1960s Vietnam? As it turns out, until the early 1970s, before the fall of Saigon, street fashion in South Vietnam adopted elements of…

The Man who snuck into the Vietnam War Zone to Buy his Best Friends a Beer

“A lot of my friends were serving in Vietnam. I just wanted to go over there and buy them all a beer. That’s what I did”. John ‘Chickie’ Donohue was a civilian merchant marine from New York City who conned his way into Vietnam at the height of the war to search for his enlisted three best friends and…