June 2024
Second Edition

The First Edition was published in November 2019.
This edition also includes new content from 2020 - 2024.

Crowbar Hotel: Live From CDCR  is the culmination of contraband smartphone photos taken in prison by incarcerated Bloods and Crips gang members. Photos and videos were sent in by inmates, with content found by following their social media accounts. Most of the content was created between 2016 and 2019 from different CDCR state prisons in California, such as Lancaster, California City, Corcoran, Calipatria, and other facilities. The incarcerated depicted serve sentences varying from minimum to maximum, in security level one to level four.

Young gangbangers ready to prove themselves and prison-hardened gangsters that have done twenty years and counting.

The book is a visual anthropological documentation of the secret smartphone activity of Bloods and Crips gang members locked up in California state prisons; who also represent the majority of (online active) inmates.

The content includes satellite photos of CDCR prison facilities, portraits, and video stills of inmates tattooing, working out, and cooking inside their cells. 

Specifications - Softcover (Thread Sewn). 324 pages. Dimensions: 22 x 17 cm

April 2024
Third Edition 
The First Edition was published in December 2021
The Second Edition was published in June 2022

Ultra Violent is a visual study that focuses on the appearance and behavior of diehard football club fans, known as Ultras and Casuals.

Men join these groups and riot for fun because it’s an instant way to feel they’re connected to a community. The antisocial kick is like doing drugs: bad for you but addictive. Violence produces endorphins and lets their adrenaline flow. It’s like sex – you live in the moment.

This publication comprises low-resolution grayscale images, reframed and cut to create a new, first-person perspective of the lifestyles of football fanatics from the streets to the stands.

When you quickly flip through this book, it hardly differs from zapping through hundreds of news channels or scrolling through your timeline on social media. The enormous number of (horrific) images we see every day, unsolicited, makes us realize less and less what we are actually looking at. We cannot (and do not want to) close ourselves off from our contemporary, violent visual culture. The author used hardcore football culture to study this.

Specifications - Hardcover. 100 pages. Dimensions: 24 x 17 cm

December 2023

The First Edition was published in December 2018

THE NEW EDITION OF 550BC's FIRST EVER TITLE

‘‘In life, a man must either become angelic or human or animal. I have become none of these things.‘‘

Explore the gritty underworld of Tehran's gangland through the captivating story of a notorious gangster known as ''The Eagle of Iran'' and his associates. Dive into their criminal mystique, marked by tattoos with poetic stories, facial scars, and flashy rings. These gangsters, unapologetically flaunting their masculinity, draw inspiration from traditional notions of strength and control. Posing in tea houses to sharing snaps from notorious prisons, and revealing a complex bond with Shīʿa Islam. Unravel the profound impact of martyrdom on these criminals, as they navigate the echoes of war and seek redemption in the sacred shrines of Iran. Step into their turbulent reality, where the line between sin and sacrifice becomes blurred.

Specifications - Hardcover. 164 pages. Full-Color pages with spot-UV treatment may be slightly wavy. This is not considered a flaw and will flatten more overtime.

‘’Sometimes I feel like we are pawns in a game.
God whispers in one of my ears while the devil speaks to me in the other.
I try to do good but something stops me.‘’

Since the summer of 2018, photographer Federico Vespignani spent a few years with a group of kids from the Barrio 18 gang in Honduras and watched as they grew up within this imaginary border, becoming look-outs and then soldiers.

Surrounding the hill is an imaginary border and the kids from the neighborhood will tell you “La Dieciocho controla.” Their presence permeates every aspect of life in the hood and for some, the barrio is everything. Gang membership is a grey concept in Cerrito Lindo - it is just a part of life in the hood. It is the place you were born, where you are from. It is what they live, and outside of these blood-drawn borders, death waits.

Some of the portrayed in this book have lost their lives, some ended up in jail, some found god, and others left to look for something else.

The photographer Federico Vespignani (1988) is an Italian photographer and cinematographer. Since 2015 he has covered organized crime and environmental issues in Central America.

Specifications - Softcover. 112 pages.