black and white photography by rob gardiner.

It has been a summer of long distance holidays, visits to family, and family visits. It is about time I posted some photos. Recently I shot a commission to document Mayfair in London, I thought you might like to see some of the pics that I consider capture the essence of Mayfair. For those not familiar, it is the quintessential square mile of classic London, lots of icons of englishness, old wealth, it is the hang out of the well-to-do. (Shooting with a rangefinder, I usually compose horizontally, but the book calls for mostly portrait aspect. Funny how much that can throw you off balance).

Last Saturday, a herd of sheep was driven through central London streets to assert the ancient historic rights of the Freemen of the City of London. Leading the flock were architects Richard Rogers and Renzo Piano (the Pompidou Centre in Paris is theirs, amongst others). Joining them were a dozen butchers of the Worshipful Company of Butchers. It was all in celebration of the London Architecture Week.

The route (map) took them from the Borough Market to the ancient Smithfield Meat Market via the Millennium Bridge over the Thames and past St Pauls. The butchers were “non-practising” - the sheep were transported back to the farm for killing out of public view.

It was not something you see everyday. Many thousands watched the event along the route. The shepherds spent more time herding us backwards-walking photographers than the 20 odd sheep.

All pictures per usual Leica M6 35/2.0 Tri-X PMK Pyro

The Sultan, his 40ft elephant, and a 16ft giant little girl have just completed a 4 day tour of London. It climaxed on Sunday with what I would estimate as 100,000-200,000 people on the streets chasing the characters. This was the product of a French theatre group. You can see something like 5,000 images of the event on flickr.com.

Still recovering from a broken arm, I could do little but set my camera to f8, 1/500s, and 3m focus and hope for the best, but the roll out I took came out quite well. I tried to capture some of the action and ‘liveness’ of the puppets. Surreal (and free!) events like this are what makes London great, incomparable even.

You might recognise this. I’ve taken photos of the spider in New York in 2001. Twice. I think I grabbed a photo of it in London in 2004 but it is not on this website. This time it is outside the Mori Art Museum, Raponggi, Tokyo.