550BC - ULTRA VIOLENT

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.