Linda McCartney may have had A-list access as a Beatles wife but that shouldn't overshadow her natural skill as a photographer. While Yoko Ono was the more famous artist, Linda Eastman was a genuine professional and was working in London on assignment for Rolling Stone magazine when she met Paul in 1967, in a club yards from the gallery now hosting a collection of photographs marking the 10th anniversary of her death.

This carefully curated show took longer to produce than any Beatles album, involving a three-year collaboration between Paul and Mary McCartney (her mother's photographic heir), gallerist James Hyman and Paul Caffell, specialist printer of the lasting, Platinum prints popularised in the Sixties by Bailey.

Twenty-eight images open on calling-card portraits of Paul's contemporaries: Mick Jagger, mock-coy, looking over a shoulder; a tragic Janis Joplin, lost in space; and Jim Morrison singing with eyes closed, looking uncannily dead. Lennon and McCartney defy the mythology, sitting close and laughing in Abbey Road studios (in 1969), and McCartney is observed, alone, rolling a joint in Jamaica.

McCartney and the children make appearances throughout, with designer Stella revealing precocious fashion awareness in Montserrat, posing with face half-hidden and hands like a model's, defiantly inside a sweatshirt. A knowing Cartier-Bresson reference creeps into an informal family shot in Scotland as son James is frozen mid-leap while Stella plays and father, in a gown, looks on.

The selection sensibly pulls away from celebrity mugshots and includes Linda's playfully artful shots, which reveal a strong sense of composition. She shifts through the tonal range and into moody graininess, and exploits the graphic potential of locations to suggest entrapment. Simon and Garfunkel face each other near a mesh of microphone stands, their open mouths dispersing almost audible harmonies from The Sounds of Silence, while Gilbert and George, conversing behind railings, are already, in 1985, trapped in their self-created identities.

The self-portraits are most poignant, particularly the ultimate, taken in Francis Bacon's studio months before the photographer's death. William Blake's death mask bust glows symbolically in the room where McCartney, shorn of her blonde hair, stands erect, staring her fate in the eye in a shattered mirror. The final confirmation of her status as a photographer beyond the rock universe closes a noteworthy, unsentimental show.

From Friday until 19 July (020 7494 385, www.jameshymangallery.com)

Camera ready: Linda McCartney used her A-list access for informal shots of Paul�fs contemporaries such as Mick Jagger (1969)