The Notting Hill Carnival is Europe's largest street festival, an annual African-Caribbean celebration held in West London over the August Bank Holiday weekend.

Before sunrise on carnival morning, the streets of Notting Hill fill with a different energy than the parade that follows hours later. This is J'Ouvert — "daybreak" — and at its centre are the Jab Jabs: men and boys covered in black oil, wrapped in chains, horned and snarling, moving through the half-light like something ancient.

It looks, to the uninitiated, like devilry. That's exactly the point. The word "jab" comes from the French diable — devil — a name colonisers once hurled at the enslaved Africans of Grenada and Trinidad as an insult. After emancipation in 1834, freed people picked the word back up and wore it. If they were going to be called devils, they'd become the most devastating devils imaginable, and parade that image through the streets at dawn as a mockery of the men who'd enslaved them.

What I tried to capture here isn't menace, but theatre — protest staged as performance, grief transformed into something defiant and almost joyful. Two centuries on, the chains are still worn, but now they're broken on the body, not binding it. This series is a small attempt to hold onto that history, and to look at Jab Jab the way it was always meant to be seen: not as darkness, but as triumph.