Tomorrow 22nd January is Peter Beard’s 73rd birthday. Even if many would consider is career as an artist to be behind him, Beard is still present in many publications. Either because as a photographer, his predictions on Africa‘s future are becoming truer everyday, or because as an artist, his diaries remain unique pieces documenting one’s life and inspiring others’. Nonetheless, he is also regarded as an true dandy, handsome and elegant ; perhaps making him a sort of role-model many would sought to imitate.

Bloody self-portrait, 1972-73

Gifted in several ways – his unique family background, his self-admitted luck, his creativity of course, and multi-polar passions – Beard uses photography as the foundation for works ranging from collages to film-making or acting. His personal life takes such a part into his creations, differentiate the two would be a tedious challenge. He brought fashion and supermodels into African landscapes as much as he brought Africa’s nature to the West, in a complete new way.

Tour d’horizon of his career and his life in a couple of dates, books, locations, wives and style.

Peter Hill Beard was born on 22nd January 1938 in New York. Raised in a wealthy family, from his great grandfather – at the origin of several industrial successes during the late 19th century -, to his mother, figure-skating champion, and his step-grandfather, tobacco industrialist. His father was working in New York City for a financial institution.

Early on, Beard takes up photography – with a Voightlander camera given to him by his grandmother, probably in 1945 – and at about 10 years old, he starts making collages. These 2 forms of expression will quickly blend together.

First Camera

In 1955, Beard takes his first trip to Africa. South Africa first, then Hluhluwe and iMfolozi parks, Bechouanaland (now Botswana), Gorongoza Park (Mozambique), Madagascar and finally Kenya. Some of the pictures taken that summer would later end up in “The End of the Game“, his trademark book and masterpiece (keep reading).

Back in the U.S., he starts studying pre-med at Yale, before switching majors. He would later say:

It soon became painfully clear that humans were the disease, so I decided to major in art.

After his junior year at Yale, Beard would return to Africa in 1960 and on the way read Karen Blixen‘s Out of Africa, whom he would meet and photograph a few years later. On this second trip, he met key persons within the African parks’ administration and surprisingly enough, went on hunting with some of them. He also admitted shooting animals himself.

Introduced by Karen Blixen, he worked at Kenya’s Tsavo National Park, during which time he photographed elephants and rhinos, and continuing his collages. First published in 1965,”The End of the Game” documents the hunting practices and the hunters in Africa.

During this period, he acquires land (~ 182,000 square meters) near Ngong Hills in Kenya and calls it Hog Ranch. Karen Blixen is among his neighbors and Hog Ranch is from then his home base in East Africa.

@ Hog Ranch

In the late sixties, he participates on a study of elephants and hippopotamuses population and until 1968, study crocodiles for the Kenya game department. From this latter experience Beard will publish “Eyelids of Morning– The Mingled Destines of Crocodiles and Men” in 1973.

Beard was arrested in 1969 by the Kenyan police for “assault and wrongful confinement” of a poacher at Hog Ranch. Years before, Beard punched a suni (small African antelope) poacher on his property, after some arguments. The incident did not make wave for a long time but eventually came back. Beard would eventually be condemned to 18 months and lashes but was released after 10 days in the hole and spared the lashes…

Though going back to the U.S. several times, notably purchasing the Montauk Mill estate, the early 70′s are also spent in Africa, culminating with the photography of dead elephants in Kenya.

Elephant

Truman Capote would eventually collaborates with Beard on “It Shall Soon Be Here”, a book about the Rolling Stones’ tour “Exiles on Main Street” in 1972. The book was never actually published.

In 1977, Beard updates “The End of The Game” and prepare his first major exhibition at the International Center of Photography in New York City: a mix of photographs, elephant carcasses, burned diaries, taxidermy, African artifacts, books and personal memorabilia.

Poster for the 1977 exhibition by Marvin Israel

A few months earlier, his property of Montauk Mill burns down, turning into ashes years of diaries, souvenirs and original works. The property was an essential meeting point for the jet-setters and Studio 54 fans, had Andy Warhol as a neighbor and received the visits of all the must-seen New-York and U.S. scene of the time. Peter Beard’s social life is in full part of his legend, cultivating the paradoxes of a raw life at Hog Ranch with an all-luxury American lifestyle.

Beard’s milieu consisted of Andy Warhol, Jackie Onassis, Lee Radziwill, Truman Capote, and Bianca Jagger who all lived and rented houses in Montauk and Manhattan, NY in the 1970s and 1980s. Beard also had a close relationship with the late painter, Francis Bacon (painter). He photographed Bacon and was also the model for several of Bacon’s paintings. Beard was traveling with and photographing the Rolling Stones on the infamous Rolling Stones 1972 tour of America.

- from Wikipedia

Mick Jagger, 1972

Truman Capote in Montauk, 1972

Mick Jagger, Catherine Deneuve and Andy Warhol at Montauk, 1975

Beard married Minnie Cushings in the 1967, then to Cheryl Tiegs (top picture below) – to whom he refers as ‘wife number 2′ because of a funny divorce term – Beard finally marries Nejma Khanum (bottom picture below from 2007). Their daughter, Zara Sophia Beard, was born on 22 September 1988 in New York City.

In 1996, he was skewered and trampled by an elephant. Nonetheless, Beard traveled back to France for his first major retrospective ‘Carnets Africains’ opened at the Centre National de la Photographie in Paris.

Paris Exhibition

In 2004, “Zara’s Tales: Perilous Escapades in Equatorial Africa“, written for his daughter is published. Taschen would re-edit it in November 2006, followed with a revised edition of “The end of the Game” and a limited Trade Edition

Unpublished cover for Zara's Tales

Finally in late 2008, The Pirelli Calendar 2009 is published. Shot in Botswana a couple of months earlier, it is my opinion the most accomplished work Beard produced. A perfect mix of the three pillars of his career: Africa/elephants, women & commercial work.

According to the Wall Street Journal, he now lives in the South of France, while his 3rd wife Nejma and daughter Zara are staying at the Montauk Mill, which is on sale for about US$ 25 millions!

Selected works:











Links & Interestingness:

Still from the movie "Hallelujah the Hills", 1962 (now the frontpage of peterbeard.com)

Excerpt from Dan Eldon scrapbook