Gardening leave can be a dull experience. There's only so much time you can spend lying on a beach, or learning about fine wines. Mark Eban came up with an altogether more exhaustive pastime before taking up his position as head of global equity capital markets at Commerzbank earlier this year.
In February he left Credit Suisse First Boston, a firm he had only just joined after his previous employer, BZW, had been sold to the Swiss bank. While waiting to take up his new job, he decided to revisit his old university hobby, photography.
"When I was at Cambridge 20 years ago I took hundreds of black and white photos of my contemporaries," says Eban. "While I was on my leave I picked out the best shots and tracked down as many of the people that I could, took new photos, and asked them to write a précis of what they'd done since leaving university."
In all, Eban managed to track down 55 of his former contemporaries, including Mark Johnson, editor of Euroweek, a sister publication of Euromoney, and is publishing his work as a book in mid-October. The photographs will also form an exhibition at the Zelda Cheatle gallery in London's Mayfair, until November 20.