Carlos Alba | I’ll Bet The Devil My Head

CARLOS ALBA
I’ll Bet The Devil My Head

2013-2019

Over a period of 4 years, whilst living in Tower Hamlets – one of the boroughs of London, Carlos Alba documented the daily life of a family of local Red foxes. In Tower Hamlets, 43% of children live in poverty—the highest rate in London—yet his neighbourhood is surrounded by two of the most important financial areas in the world: The City of London and Canary Wharf.

To make this project, Alba would begin photographing in the hours when both the city brokers left their offices and the foxes came out onto the streets. Echoing the methodology of a wildlife photographer, Alba studied the behaviour of his subjects and waited patiently for both humans and foxes to appear. The resulting photographs show the fleeting movement of both the foxes and city workers through the same streets. The backdrops show both austere, slick office buildings and also areas where nature is slowly encroaching on the city.

“I selected the urban foxes as a metaphor of the working class, the ravens as an element of social control and the brookers as the elite of this fable. I like to play with the universal language of a short story that tells a moral truth and can be interpreted from children to ancients.” – says. Carlos Alba.

The visual tale, titled ‘I’ll Bet The Devil My Head’, metaphorically underlines the shared traits and experiences between humans and foxes, highlighting the disparities among inhabitants of different London neighbourhoods.

Although the project focuses on one small area of London, it acts as a global metaphor for inequality, with the use of the fox, familiar since Aesop’s fables over 2500 years ago.

This exhibition is held with the support of The Spanish Embassy in Poland.

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» GET TO KNOW THE ARTIST «

Carlos Alba lives and works between London, Singapore and Madrid. He is a visual artist working mainly with photography, video, painting and installation. His work focuses on human and non-human relationships in the modern world, especially subjects related to his life. He uses his artwork as therapy to understand his feelings, his past, his masculinity, and his fears. He is exploring issues from everyday life, especially those that affect vulnerable living beings. His tools are objects and archives that help him find the final visual artwork he wants to make.

Alba received several prizes such as the Tokyo International Photography Competition (Japan, 2017) and Landskrona Foto Festival (Sweden, 2017). He was a finalist for the Best Photobook of the Year Award by PHotoEspaña (Spain, 2020), and the GetxoPhoto Festival (Spain, 2019).

His work has been exhibited at various galleries and museums worldwide, from China, to Japan, from London to Landskrona, Lódź, Paris, Thessaloniki, and Madrid.

His monographs, ‘The Taste of The Wind’ (2019) and ‘The Observation of Trifles’ (2016), are part of collections in institutions such as Tate Library (UK), Harvard Library (USA), The Library Project (Ireland), Lightbox Photography Library (Taiwan), Reminders Photography Stronghold (RPS) (Japan), and Fundación Foto Colectanica (Spain).