Once Upon a Hood features photographs and Polaroids spanning from the 1970s to the early 2000s, presenting them as a keepsake of the visual language of street and gang culture in California. These photographs were once private correspondence between friends, lovers, and families. Traveling through auctions, raids, and confiscations, they found their way to these pages.
This particular selection originates from a donation by a collector, who entrusted 550BC with a box of over 1,000 photographs. On their website, an email address is provided for those who might recognize themselves. The project places emphasis on these images not as ends in themselves, but as traces of real lives.
Behind one of the most narrated ways of life in popular culture are people who existed beyond the images that now circulate. As the author suggests, the photographs now exist “somewhere between artifact and Americana”—caught between lived reality and their afterlife as a cultural image.
The event at Spazio Maiocchi translated the book into space. Large prints, original Polaroids, and photographs under glass on a wooden table invited a closer encounter with the images and the lives they hold.
Once Upon a Hood is now available at Slam Jam locations worldwide, continuing its movement between archive, image, and recognition.
550BC
Once Upon a Hood Book
