I’ll Bet the Devil My Head - Carlos Alba

I’ll Bet the Devil My Head — a Void photobook on foxes, inequality, and London

I’ll Bet the Devil My Head is a photobook by Carlos Alba published by Void, built as a visual fable around urban foxes in London. The book does not treat animals as simple documentary subjects. Instead, it uses them as a metaphorical structure through which class difference, exclusion, and uneven urban life become visible.

The project is rooted in one area of East London, especially Tower Hamlets, a borough marked by sharp inequality while also lying beside Canary Wharf and the City of London. In Alba’s framing, the foxes stand in for the working class, brokers figure as the elite, and ravens enter the book as a sign of social control. That symbolic structure gives the work a cold and legible clarity without flattening it into a slogan.

The result is a small-format photobook with a strong conceptual spine. Night streets, office architecture, patches of urban nature, and the fleeting movement of animals and workers are drawn into the same visual field. Although the setting is specific, the book pushes beyond local reportage. It reads as a broader allegory of inequality, adaptation, and the contested life of the modern city.

Urban wildlife as social fable

• Urban foxes used as a metaphor for the working class
• Set against the social geography of London
• Links Brexit-era tension with urban division
• Moves between photobook, fable, and social observation
• Relevant for readers of contemporary documentary and artist-led photobooks

Edition details for I’ll Bet the Devil My Head

• Artist: Carlos Alba
• Publisher: Void
• Publication year: 2023
• Format: photobook / artist book
• Binding: flexicover with cloth
• Size: 11.5 × 16 cm
• Extent: 104 pages
• Edition: limited edition of 500 copies
• ISBN: 978-618-5479-27-5
• Designer: João Linneu
• Editor: Myrto Steiriou

Publisher / Manufacturer: Void
Country of origin: Greece
Website: https://void.photo/

Email: talkto@void.photo
Address:
Void
Zaimi 31–33
106 82 Athens
Greece

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