The Elephant Parade

I went out today to photograph some of the 250 brightly painted elephants that have landed across London as part of the Elephant Parade. The Elephant Parade is a conservation campaign organised by Mike and Mark Spits to highlight the plight of the Asian elephant, and features the work of many of the world’s most celebrated artists. The models themselves will be auctioned in June and July of this year to raise money for the Elephant Family charity, and if you can’t wait that long to get your hands on one of these noble beasts, you can buy scale models at Selfridges, where some of the full-size models can also be found. There’s a map of the elephants’ locations here, but today I focussed on the ones that you can find in the Royal Parks in central London – namely St James’ Park, Green Park and Hyde Park.

This kind of campaigning has a long and distinguished history, starting with the Cow Parade which saw model cows appearing on the streets of Chicago in 1999, followed by the Buddy Bears that were shown for the first time in the centre of Berlin in 2001. You can follow the developments of the new campaign here on Twitter and also on Facebook, so do go and check out the elephants across town if you get the chance