Known for collage work combining photographs and journals, Peter Beard, "well known for his handsome looks," documents his urbane lifestyle that includes African travels, especially endangered African elephants, association with Hollywood celebrities, the New York art scene, and insider relationships during the Kennedy administration. His work reflects his realationships with notables such as Mick Jagger and the Rolling Stones, David Bowie, Andy Warhol, Truman Capote, Jackie Onassis, and supermodels such as his first wife, Cheryl Tiegs.

Page after page of his work "is covered with photographs of women, transcribed telephone messages, marginalia in India ink, clippings from the daily newspapers, dried leaves and insects, old sepia-toned photographs, drawings of animals and people by Kikuyu artists, quotes by Joseph Conrad, found objects, images of decaying elephant carcasses, and sometimes, Beard's own blood."

From childhood, Beard has done collage work and kept diaries. In 1975, he had his first art exhibition, which was in New York City at the Blum Helman Gallery, and since then his creativity has received much public attention.

Peter Beard is a graduate of Yale University with a degree in art history. Of great inspiration to him is the book Out of Africa by Karen Blixen. He became a friend of Blixen, whom he met in Denmark, and in 1955, took his first trip to Africa. He later bought a 43 acre farm in Kenya adjacent to Blixen's land. He is married to Hajma Khanum, and has a daughter, Zara, for whom he has written a book: Zara's Tales.

Helping to support his extensive travels and lifestyle is a trust fund from his great-grandfather, James J. Hill, founder of the Great Northern Railway. Hill's great interest in the arts as well as the fine art collection he amassed have also had great influence on Beard.


Source:
Wikipedia: "Peter Hill Beard"
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Artist Statement:

When I first went to Kenya in August 1955, I could never have guessed what was going to happen. Kenya's population was roughly five million, with about 100 tribes scattered throughout the endless "wild—deer—ness" - it was authentic, unspoiled, teeming with big game — so enormous it appeared inexhaustible.

Everyone agreed it was too big to be destroyed. Now Kenya's population of over 30 million drains the country's limited and diminishing resources at an amazing rate: surrounding, isolating, and relentlessly pressuring the last pockets of wildlife in denatured Africa.

The beautiful play period has come to an end. Millions of years of evolutionary processes have been destroyed in the blink of an eye.

The Pleistocene is paved over, cannibalism is swallowed up by commercialism, arrows become AK- 47s, colonialism is replaced by the power, the prestige and the corruption of the international aid industry. This is The End Of The Game over and over.

What could possibly be next? Density and stress — aid and AIDS, deep blue computers and Nintendo robots, heart disease and cancer, liposuction and rhinoplasty, digital pets and Tamaguchi toys deliver us into the brave new world.

Source:
www.peterbeard.com

Wildlife photographer Peter Beard found dead near his home.

Originally published by The Associated Press on April 20, 2020 (excerpt)
NEW YORK — Artist, adventurer and celebrated wildlife photographer Peter Beard was found dead in woods near his cliff-side home at the tip of Long Island nearly a month after his family reported him missing. He was 82.

“He died where he lived: in nature,” his family said in a statement posted on Beard’s website Sunday night.

“Peter defined what it means to be open: open to new ideas, new encounters, new people, new ways of living and being,” his family said in its statement. “Always insatiably curious, he pursued his passions without restraints and perceived reality through a unique lens.”

In recent years, the once-swashbuckling explorer had developed dementia and had at least one stroke, according to the New York Times. His family confirmed that a body found Sunday in Camp Hero State Park in Montauk was Beard’s.

Born in 1938 in New York City, raised in New York City, Alabama, and Bayberry Point, Islip, Long Island, Peter Beard kept diaries at an early age. He took his first pictures at twelve and photography quickly evolved into an extension of his diaries, as a way to preserve and remember vacations and favorite things. In 1957 he entered Yale University as a pre-medical student, but perceiving humans as the main disease soon switched to art history, studying under Vincent Scully, Joseph Albers, and Richard Lindner.

Trips to Africa in 1955 and 1960 piqued his interests and after graduating from Yale, he returned to Kenya via Karen Blixen (Isak Dinesen) in Rungstedlund, Denmark. She was the author of Out of Africa, Shadows In the Grass, Gothic Tales and Mottos In My Life.

Beard met Blixen through his cousin Jerome Hill. In the early 60s he worked at Kenya's Tsavo National Park, during which time he photographed and documented the demise of over 35,000 elephants and 5000 Black Rhinos and published two of The End of the Game books (1965 & 1977).

During this same time period, he acquired Hog Ranch, the property adjacent to Karen Blixen's near the Ngong Hills and made it his home base in East Africa.

Beard has written further works on his African experience: Eyelids of the Morning: The Mingled Destines of Crocodiles and Men(1973), Longing for Darkness (1975), and his most recent books, Zara's Tales: Perilous Escapades in Equatorial Africa (2004) written for his daughter and his latest book Peter Beard, published by Taschen in November 2006.

His first exhibit was at the Blum Helman Gallery In New York in 1975 and was followed in 1977 by the landmark installation of his photographs, elephant carcasses, burned diaries, taxidermy, African artifacts, books and personal memorabilia at the International Center of Photography (his first one man show) in New York City.

In addition to creating original artwork, Beard has befriended and collaborated on projects with many artists including Andy Warhol, Andrew Wyeth, Richard Lindner, Terry Southern, Truman Capote, and Francis Bacon.

In 1996, shortly after he was skewered and trampled by an elephant, his first major retrospective opened at the Centre National de la Photographie in Paris, followed by other exhibits in Berlin, London, Toronto, Madrid, Milan, Tokyo and Vienna.

He now lives in New York City, Montauk Point, and Kenya with his wife Nejma and daughter Zara.

Peter Beard was born and raised in New York City, Alabama and on Long Island. He began keeping diaries as a child and, after discovering photography at the age of twelve, used photographs to extend and enhance them. Beard attended Yale University where he enrolled as a medical student, but quickly changed his major to art history.

In 1955 and again in 1960 Beard safaried in Africa with his mother. He took many pictures of the wildlife there and began combining them into collages highlighted by the use of animal blood and remains, to create his work. Beard's first exhibition was at the Blum Helman Gallery in 1975. Some years later, after becoming close friends with Karen Blixen, author of Out of Africa, he purchased a 43-acre farm in Africa. This piece of land was adjacent to her Karen farm in Kenya at the foot of the Ngong Hills- a property which he named "Hog Ranch". Blixen left him her archive of photographs, as well as some of her personal writings. Beard frequently incorporates these in his collage-diaries.