LAYERS: Looking Inside Holloway Prison (Ashsa’s Story)

LAYERS: LOOKING INSIDE HMP HOLLOWAY

Power Play Productions and The Daddyless Daughters Project presents a groundbreaking doc-series showcasing 30 former prisoners of different ages, races, classes, and gender-expressions.

LAYERS: Looking Inside Holloway Prison is an immersive exhibition of photographs, films and letters that reveals the breadth of lives touched by the criminal justice system.

This exhibition features photographs (taken by Joya Berrow) and films (directed by Aliyah Ali and Sophie Compton, DOP Asia Rose Kilgallon) shot on location at the derelict HMP Holloway, once Europe's largest Women's Prison, before it was demolished. It is the culmination of a year-long community project centred around the Holloway site's closure.

Women in prison are often depicted in stereotyped and voyeuristic ways. LAYERS overturns that. Telling the stories of 30 contributors who have gone on to be poets, funeral directors, mums, CEOs, boxers, the exhibition reveals the range of individual experiences in the justice system. At the same time, it also shines a light on systemic patterns of trauma, poverty, and abuse that disproportionately impact women prisoners.