Once Upon A Hood (Akimbo Chicano Cover)

CALIFORNIA GANG LIFE IN VINTAGE PHOTOGRAPHS

This photobook presents a rare archive of over 1,000 analog photographs and Polaroids spanning from the 1970s to the early 2000s, carefully edited down to a selection of 193 images and newly scanned for preservation and print. Taken inside California prisons and across everyday life, these photographs document gang identity, relationships, and survival through portraits, group shots, family pictures, and handwritten messages never meant for public view.

Collected over decades and resurfacing through confiscations, raids, and auctions, the images trace the visual language of street and prison culture: tattoos, gestures, fashion, pride, loss, love, and loyalty. Lovers, homies, children, and relatives appear alongside symbols of affiliation and belonging.

Once private keepsakes passed hand to hand, these photographs now exist as powerful historical artifacts. Preserved here in their original form, they offer a raw, intimate, and deeply human record of lives rarely seen on their own terms.

550BC is an independent publishing house based in Amsterdam, founded in 2018. Specializing in the complex realities of organized crime and conflict, we explore these subjects through the lens of visual anthropology. Our photo books provide rare, first-person perspectives from within otherwise inaccessible worlds, often created in direct collaboration with those involved.