I'll Bet the Devil My Head

I'll Bet the Devil My Head — urban foxes, class division, and the social geography of East London

Carlos Alba's I'll Bet the Devil My Head is a 2023 photobook published by Void Photo that constructs a visual fable from the streets of East London. The book does not treat urban foxes as documentary subjects in any conventional sense. Instead, they operate as a symbolic structure through which class difference, exclusion, and the uneven distribution of urban life become legible.

The project is grounded in Tower Hamlets — a borough defined by sharp internal inequality, positioned directly beside Canary Wharf and the City of London. In Alba's framework, the foxes stand in for the working class, brokers for the elite, and ravens appear as figures of social control. That allegorical architecture gives the work a cold clarity without reducing it to illustration. Night streets, corporate architecture, fragments of urban nature, and the movement of animals and workers are held within the same visual field.

The setting is specific, but the book reaches beyond local reportage. It reads as a broader account of adaptation, exclusion, and the contested logic of the contemporary city — one that draws on the moral structure of a fable without sentimentalising its subject.

• Urban foxes deployed as a metaphor for the working class in contemporary London
• Set across Tower Hamlets, Canary Wharf, and the City of London
• Structured as a social fable with a defined symbolic cast: foxes, brokers, ravens
• Engages with Brexit-era urban division and class inequality
• Moves between documentary photography and allegorical form
• Small-format, limited edition of 500 copies — flexicover with cloth binding