I met Alex through shambolic Peckham pub super-group The Saudis.
“I started taking photographs at a young age. I once made a semi-fictitious documentary with Portsmouth City Council about pest control and later a comedy about the film industry.” Turning down a film school scholarship at 16 and living in the US as a teenager, Alex gave up photography altogether for a time, after joining a Native American tribe.
As a schoolboy Alex held his first show at a small gallery in Portsmouth. “I wanted to do the craziest most spectacular thing I could do in the realms of low budget”. Living opposite a bird sanctury at the time, it wasn’t hard to convince the falconers to lend him several birds of prey including an Eagle Owl that stood at two feet tall. The bird stood tethered to their perches amid the photographs. “I just though it was incredible, no-one had ever done this before”.
“I wanted people to walk round in silence and be really reverent admiring the huge creatures but actually everyone got really pissed. I wasn’t in the room, when my friend backhanded the bird, I did hear the screams though. I was actually on the roof of the gallery smoking a spliff with this girl that I was totally in love with.”
Within seconds the gallery cleared amid screams as the bird tried to escape flying up then bouncing back to the ground still attached to their perches.
“You should have heard the idea I wanted to do”
Alex currently lives in London and continues to take photographs, just not on his own camera. That broke whilst on tour in Algeria in 2008.
Alexander Sebley