Peter Beard American, 1938-2020

Peter Beard (1938 - 2020), was a photographer from New York. A childhood obsession with nature blossomed during summers spent with his grandmother who gave him his first camera, a Voightländer. Taking pictures became a natural extension of the way he already preserved his memories in meticulously crafted diaries. At seventeen he went on a life-changing trip to Africa with Quentin Keynes, the explorer and great grandson of Charles Darwin, working on a film documenting rare wildlife including the white and black rhinos of Zululand.

Beard entered Yale as a pre-med student and in a class on population dynamics he formed his enduring hypothesis that humans are, in fact, the main disease. He switched his focus to art and began studying under Vincent Scully, Joseph Albers, and Richard Lindner. Beard’s insatiable desire to explore lured him back to Africa, and in lieu of completing his senior thesis at school, he mailed in his diaries from Kenya. Beard worked in Tsavo National Park documenting the imbalance between the people, the land, and the animals for his book The End of the Game (1965). In Beard’s second iteration of The End of the Game (1977) he documented a massive population die-off in Tsavo of 35,000 elephants and 5,000 rhinos as the animals succumbed to starvation and stress and density related diseases. 

Beard’s first exhibition opened at the Blum Helman Gallery in New York in 1975 followed by a landmark 1977 one-man exhibition at the International Center of Photography, New York. Beard has exhibited internationally ever since. In 1996, Beard’s retrospective exhibition at the Centre National de la Photographie in Paris opened as the artist recovered from being trampled and speared in the leg by the tusk of an elephant.  Throughout his travels and career Beard has befriended and collaborated with artists including Andy Warhol, Francis Bacon, Salvador Dali, Richard Lindner, Terry Southern, and Truman Capote.