Scammer

On one of my regular photographic safaris around the city of Barcelona, I found this poster depicting someone called Albert Cavallé, whom I had never heard about. It really intrigued me. We usually see that kind of posters referring to a lost pet or a missing object. It reminded me of the Far West’s “WANTED” posters. So I decided to take a picture of it and do some research about this person. I found out that Cavallé was known by the media as “the love scammer”. He scammed some 20 women out of more than 150.000 euros between 2013 and 2019. His modus operandi was always the same. He used a fake identity to seduce women in social media such as Tinder, and then convinced them to give him big amounts of money. On the trials he was always found not guilty, and he was even close to participating in Big Brother VIP, as if he were a celebrity. On May 14th 2019 he was finally sentenced to 18 months in prison, but he never served the time. Sometimes justice is a scam. And most of the time reality television is, too. Not to mention sensationalist television. I decided to focus on this concept. On contradiction, on the hypocrisy of society, on its victims, that we all are: everything can be seen, in one way or another, as a scam. I started to observe the city from a very different point of view: advertising, tourism, consumer society, the banking system —from a certain perspective everything showed hypocrisy, lies, trickery, façades. The city seemed suddenly like a big carnival. And my camera was a tool to analyse, dissect and unmask it. Starting from the idea that capitalism is nothing but a hidden, pyramidal and perfect scam which seduces us continuously, the paired images on this project show many of the aspects related to such permanent fraud. By using the language of photography —and art, I hope—, I intend to base my work on what Mark Twain said: “It is easier to fool people than to convince them that they have been fooled”. But I will keep trying. You can see the whole project at the following link https://xavicarrion.myportfolio.com/estafador