BOOK: KENT SHEELY’S CRIME TIME
Kent Sheely has published Crime Time (2026), a new artist book collecting screenshots and digital collages produced during a decade spent inside Grand Theft Auto V Online. Released through Lulu on August 9, the 87-page, full-color paperback has a square format (8.5 × 8.5 inches) and brings together images from one of the longest-running virtual environments in contemporary videogame culture.
The book continues Sheely’s long engagement with Grand Theft Auto as a photographic environment. In 2007, Sheely produced an early series of photographs inside Grand Theft Auto: San Andreas, titled San Andreas Gamespace Photography. He subsequently developed these experiments into the interactive installation Grand Theft Photo (2008), which modified the code so that visitors could observe and photograph the simulated world but could no longer participate in its violence. A camera-shaped controller translated physical movement into changes of viewpoint within the game.
Crime Time follows several earlier passages in Sheely’s work from videogame imagery to printed matter. Between 2009 and 2012, he produced DoD inside Day of Defeat: Source, entering its multiplayer battles as a photojournalist rather than a combatant. He replaced the avatar’s weapon with screenshot capture and processed the resulting images to evoke the blurred, grainy appearance of Robert Capa’s D-Day photographs. DoD was a performance and screenshot series, rather than a book. A related but separate investigation of simulated warfare appeared in First Person: War Stories from Gamespace (2013), a 147-page paperback that assembled fifty accounts submitted by videogame players. Sheely selected the stories from an online thread and a dedicated subreddit, edited them for publication, and accompanied each narrative with screenshots from the game in which the reported encounter had occurred. The project examines how players describe virtual battles through the rhetoric of victory, sacrifice and defeat while omitting the physical consequences of actual warfare.
Where DoD and First Person concentrated on simulated combat, Crime Time records prolonged residence in a shared urban environment. The new book appears nearly thirteen years after access to Grand Theft Auto Online opened on October 1, 2013. Its decade of images therefore covers much of the platform’s existence, preserving encounters selected from sustained play rather than a single photographic intervention.
Sheely’s in-game photography also encompasses a sustained series of formal experiments across several game engines. Killcam (2012) dismantles and recombines glitched death-camera images captured in Team Fortress 2, while Rewired (2017) exploits a Source-engine fault that causes graphics to replicate when viewed against a nonexistent background. In Lucky 38 (2017), movement at several hundred times the normal running speed transforms the casino interior of Fallout: New Vegas into abstract compositions. Jostled (2018) photographs characters in Assassin’s Creed Origins at the instant the player collides with them. The Swamp: Screens in the Abyss (2021) carries this research into book form through unedited and remixed screenshots from the Garry’s Mod environment Swamp Cinema, sometimes combined with fragments of player chat. More recently, Phantom Arrays (2022) uses the virtual long-exposure tool Open World Shutter in Far Cry 5and Far Cry: New Dawn, while Impressions of Play (2024) composites unstable wireframe structures over long-exposure game screenshots. Across these works, the screenshot becomes a constructed image whose appearance depends on altered movement, technical intervention, software failure, or montage.
Kent Sheely, Crime Time, 2026. 87 pages, full color, paperback, 8.5 × 8.5 in. Published via Lulu.
Kent Sheely is an intermedia artist based in Los Angeles whose practice treats videogames as both aesthetic systems and social environments. Working across machinima, game modification, moving image, and installation, he tracks how interfaces and platform logics shape perception, behaviour, and the thin boundary between the everyday and the simulated. His work often operates through transmediation: gestures and symbols migrate between game space and lived space, returning with their meanings slightly rerouted. Sheely’s projects frequently hinge on small technical constraints that produce large conceptual shifts. Grand Theft Photo (installation, 2008) rewrites Grand Theft Auto: San Andreas into a camera-only encounter, limiting players to looking and photographing rather than acting through violence. In DoD (2009–2012) he modifies Day of Defeat: Source into a war-photography platform, removing the weapon and replacing the fire function with a shutter; the series was presented by Fotomuseum Winterthur as part of its Situationsprogramme in 2016. READY FOR ACTION (2012–2021) displaces videogame protagonists into the banal temporality of public transport, emphasising stalled agency and waiting as a lived condition. His work has been shown at HOW Art Museum, Shanghai (Serious Games, 2019), the Milan Machinima Festival, and in Ubisoft’s Photomode: Out There in Games (2022). Sheely holds a BFA in Media Art from the University of Oklahoma.