Peter Beard

Peter Beard was born in January 1938. A descendant of the Hill family, who made their fortune -founding the Great Northern Railway, he spent his childhood in New York City, Alabama and Islip, Long Island. An early preoccupation with the natural world and photography developed spending time with his grandmother in Tuxedo Park, Orange County, New York. She also gave young Beard his first camera. Aged seventeen, in 1955, he travelled to Africa with Quentin Keynes, the great-grandson of Charles Darwin, to shoot a film about rhinos. 

He enrolled at Yale University initially to study pre-med, transferring major during his studies to art history. In this department Beard studied under Josef Albers, Richard Lindner and Vincent Scully and submitted his diaries from Kenya in lieu of a senior thesis. Beard’s journals would later become a crucial part of his artistic output.

After graduating Yale, he returned to Africa and travelled by ship around the Cape of Good Hope and visited Madagascar. These early trips sparked a life-long love of the continent for Beard who devoted the next seventy years to capturing Africa’s extraordinary flora and fauna.

His visual obsession became entangled with a burning outrage about the destruction of the natural world and the endangerment of the spectacular animals he photographed. In 1965, Beard published his first book of both text and photographs: The End of the Game- The Last Word from Paradise. Combining staggering beauty with passionate warnings, The End of the Game documented the human toll on the natural world. In a New York Times review, Anthony Lukas wrote that “these are not ‘pretty’ Walt Disney shots” and that Beard demanded attention be paid to “the remorseless removal of the central symbol of African life, the animal.”

Beard had a naturally industrious approach to his photography. His youthful practice of diary-keeping developed throughout his life and career, incorporating collaging and over-painting as well as the introduction of found objects into his work. He would often embellish his works with blood (either his own or animal blood sourced from a butcher), paint and ink-based annotations. 

Though he maintained a long-time residence named Hog Ranch in Kenya – often referred as ‘Hoggers’ – Beard’s private life was dazzlingly public. The London Evening Standard once referred to him as “James Dean grown up” and he was a frequent fixture of the cosmopolitan scene, including at Manhattan’s Studio 54. Beard purchased an American home in Montauk, NY, narrowly beating out Arthur Miller and Marilyn Monroe for the six-acre estate. Here he continued to move in the same social milieu as Truman Capote and Andy Warhol and entertained houseguests such as Jacqueline Kennedy Onassis and the Rolling Stones.

Beard nurtured relationships with the great and the good, maintaining energetic correspondence and collaboration. This included the painter Francis Bacon who painted Beard nine times. Bacon became a subject of Beard himself, who documented the artist at work in his studio. 

Peter Beard died in Montauk, NY in 2020 at the age of 82.