June 2024
Second Edition
Softcover (Thread Sewn)
324 pages, 322 images including 20 satellite aerial images
Dimensions: 22 x 17 cm
ISBN: 978-90-833898-2-0

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

THE THICKEST AND MOST EXPANSIVE 550BC BOOK YET!

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. 

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.