Chrome by Alvin C. Jacobs Jr.

Chrome is a photographic study of restraint, choice, and self-mastery within Black biker culture—created as a conceptual extension of the Black Behind Bars project. While Black Behind Bars confronts the realities of physical incarceration, Chrome examines the less visible bars we grip every day: the mental limitations, beliefs, and boundaries we impose on ourselves.

At the center of this work is the idea of bars in three forms.

The first are the physical bars of the motorcycle—the handlebars. They represent control, discipline, and intentional direction. These bars are not imposed; they are chosen. They require focus, responsibility, and presence. Movement is earned, not given.

The second are mental bars—self-doubt, fear, identity constraints, unhealed narratives, and internal ceilings that restrict how far one believes they are allowed to go. In Chrome, mental health is not framed as clinical or carceral, but as the daily internal negotiation between freedom and fear, discipline and avoidance, purpose and stagnation.

Black biker culture becomes a space where those internal negotiations are confronted. Riding demands clarity. Maintenance demands patience. Community demands accountability. The road offers reflection—not escape. Chrome reflects the rider back to themselves.

The third form of bars—actual incarceration—exists in conversation with these images but is not the focus of the mental health narrative. Instead, Chrome asks a broader question that spans all lived experiences:

What bars do we accept, reinforce, or refuse—long before any system places them around us?

In this context, recidivism is not only about returning to prison, but about returning to limiting cycles—mental patterns, environments, or identities that repeatedly confine growth. Chrome positions movement, structure, and self-discipline as tools that interrupt those cycles.

Within the Black Behind Bars ecosystem, Chrome represents agency.
Not punishment.
Not pathology.
But choice.

It is a visual meditation on how freedom begins internally—and how intentional movement can either reinforce our restraints or dismantle them.

This is not a motorcycle book.

It is a study of how Black individuals confront physical bars, mental bars, and systemic boundaries—and decide which ones no longer get to define