Pouria Khojastehpay’s Zoom calls are different to your Zoom calls

Pouria Khojastehpay’s work lends to some unusual conversations. In fact, as founder of 550BC – an Amsterdam publishing company focusing on the ​“multifaceted intricacies of organised crime and conflict” – you can forget HR meetings and performance reviews.

​“The first time I had a video call with a sicario [hired assassin] commander from [Mexico’s] Sinaloa Cartel, it was quite surreal,” he tells me of his typical Zoom schedule. ​“Yet casual,” he adds, reassuringly.

Why was Khojastehpay talking to a member of one of the world’s most renowned criminal groups? For his 2022 photobook Sicario Warfare, which offers a revelatory peek into the everyday life of El Chapo’s former cartel.

The images, taken between 2019 and 2021, showcase the cartel’s shift to a paramilitary group, trained and armed in the thick jungles of rural Mexico. It’s typical of a work that occupies the fringes of society, the people who operate there, and the aesthetic this creates.

Looking through the catalogue of 550BC’s photobooks is like taking a sort of criminal-led odyssey across the globe. First stop: Rio’s drug traffickers in Favela Mafia. Then over to the UK with high-end watch thieves in Watch Rippers. Hop across to Europe and the violent world of football hooliganism in Ultra Violent, before a visit to the Netherlands’ theatre of cocaine warfare via Heavyweight. Then back across the Pacific, to Mexico’s brutal spectacle of cartel violence.

Of course, there’s a whole gamut of criminal voyeurism out there, particularly on screen where shows such as Narcos, The Sopranos, Top Boy, and Breaking Bad give dramatised accounts that scratch a certain itch, if you’re into that sort of thing. Yet, these fictionalised accounts are, well, fictional. And 550BC, well, isn’t.

Khojastehpay was born in Shiraz, Iran. He fled the Islamic Revolution there with his parents at the age of one, briefly living in a Dutch refugee centre, and still resides in the Netherlands today.

His childhood was filled with war stories from his dad (a veteran of the Iran-Iraq conflict) and his old photos. One in particular, of his father armed with an AK-47 and an Adidas T‑shirt, stuck with him: ​“I guess the aesthetic appeal in those photos sparked my interest,” he says, describing his father’s memories as ​“nothing glorifying; more the emotional consequences, the moral dilemmas, and the blurred lines between good and bad. All three are also part of the lives of a soldier, a militiaman, or a gangster.”

With that in mind, while the subjects of Khojastehpay’s books are as you’d expect – young masked men surrounded by large guns, knives, stacks of cash and piles of drugs – it’s not the extravagance of the lifestyle that’s intriguing, but the moments of mundanity: a prison pizza feast with incarcerated Bloods and Crips, a Brazilian gang member reading a copy of 550BC’s Favela Narco Pets (a study of unusual animals belonging to Rio De Janeiro’s drug traffickers, made after Khojastehpay’s mother urged him to make a book about nature), or members of the Mexican-American Playboy 13 gang visiting their wounded friend at his house. ​“It’s just shown as it is,” Khojastehpay says.

550BC was founded in 2018 and has since released 26 titles. Each has a limited drop (releasing, you guessed it, 550 copies) and the rarity of the books has created a cult following – resellers on eBay typically charge two, three, and as high as 10 times the price: ​“When something is rare, people want it more – it’s natural,” Khojastehpay says

He’s drawn to his line of work by its inherent opaqueness and his knack for circumventing it. ​“It’s so inaccessible for many people, but at the same time, it was a world I just happen to have access to.”

His entry into the world began with his home country, Iran, and his first book Crime Wave Tehran. He reached out to sources he found, and from there his interactions with the criminal world snowballed, building a reputation of trust with those he worked with.

Though Khojastehpay stresses he’s never been involved in organised crime, a layer of mystery shrouds the process of reaching his subjects. ​“Some sources I find myself. Sometimes, the source finds me,” he says. In other instances, Sicario Warfare, for example, Khojastehpay uses fixers such as casting director Eduardo Giralt Brun to connect him to subjects a little harder to reach. The criminals hand over their private Instagram feeds and SD cards and Khojastehpay turns them into coffee table books.

​“Before social media, you would never see these types of photos. Now, militants, gangsters, drug traffickers, arms brokers, many of them have a social media account or document themselves,” he says, of a new type of criminal photography, built from the everyday imagery of selfies and social media pics (an exception might be 550BC’s book about Playboy13 for which Khojastehpay used British photographer Robert Yager, who holds ​“a close, personal relationship with them as someone deeply connected to their world”).

Khojastehpay’s most recent book, Watch Rippers, ventures to the UK for a study of high-end timepiece thieving. The book documents the outfits, weapons, getaway vehicles, and, most importantly, the loot of muggers who speed around London’s capital on mopeds and electric bikes in search of an expensive time.

Like most of Khojastehpay’s work, it captures a specific moment in time that might otherwise be lost through deletion, confiscation, incarceration or even death: one in which the mundane is just as important as the miraculous.

​“People often think it’s this crazy, out-of-control world – and in some ways, it is,” Khojastehpay tells me, ​“But there’s also a side to it that’s more structured and ordinary than most would expect.”

550BC’s latest release, The Diary of a Hitman, is out now, would you believe