“Peter was an extraordinary man who led an exceptional life. He lived life to the fullest; he squeezed every drop out of every day. He was an intrepid explorer, unfailingly generous, charismatic, and discerning. Peter defined what it means to be open: open to new ideas, new encounters, new people, new ways of living and being. He died where he lived: in nature.”
He went to East Africa as a young, hotshot New York fashion photographer in the early 1960s, to photograph supermodels in the African wilderness for Life Magazine. He fell in love with the light, the wildlife, the culture and the way the sun shimmers off the early mist of dawn in an untouched wilderness, and he stayed. He went native. He saw how the wildlife was slowly being ground into extinction, and so he wrote — and photographed — a cover story for Life titled The End of the Game.
It would become the title of one of his most famous books, a record of a vanishing world. He wanted to record the twilight of East Africa’s wildlife migrations for posterity, “to capture the destruction of the region by colonialists.” He was not alone in that regard, but he alone had easy access to celebrities like Jacqueline Onassis, Diana Ross, David Bowie, Andy Warhol, Candice Bergen and Mick Jagger.
His distinctive style — marginalia in India ink — utilized a collage of handwritten diary entries, transcribed telephone messages and newspaper clippings pasted together with dried leaves, insects, found objects and original drawings. His work seems frenzied, disorganized, and yet there’s a certain order to it. His art is mercurial, but it connects. On an elemental, almost subliminal level, it makes sense.
This past Sunday, April 15, Beard was found dead in the woods near his home in Montauk, New York.
He had been missing since March 31. He was 82, and had been suffering from dementia.
In the prime of life, he was a visionary, one of a kind, and his passing marks the end of an era.
Dementia may have taken him in the end, but he survived a lot along the way. In his younger days he helped rope rhinos in relocation programs, and in the mid 1990s was famously trampled by an elephant. He lived to tell about it, too, even though he arrived at Nairobi Hospital without a pulse.
One of his lesser known works, Zara’s Tales, was a heartfelt collection of children’s tales and scrapbook material for his then five-year-old daughter Zara, who grew up on “Hog Ranch,” as they called it, Beard’s family compound just outside Nairobi. Zara grew up surrounded by outsized wart hogs with outsized personalities, surrounded by a dark forest full of reclusive, rarely seen bongo antelopes. Zara’s Tales is a throwback to a lost but not yet forgotten world.
Photography was both a passion and a calling for the young Beard. Coupled with his frenzied, distinctive writing style, it made for some colourful moments, as in this passage from Zara’s Tales when, while tracking the elusive bongo in the thick rainforest of Kenya’s Aberdare Natiuonal Park, he finally managed to capture his quarry on film. This was in the days of manual focus cameras and print film that constantly needed to be rewound and reloaded.
“Thousands of miles of hills and valleys and stinging nettles for this single vision,” Beard wrote in Zara’s Tales, his five-year-old daughter listening in on every word, “. . . the wildest sight on earth . . . right now. The rarest.
©Peter Beard
“The intensity of the furious flies, the giant eyes, the neck reaching forward, so much wildness . . . stretching the moment. Gambling out on the longest limb of chance, squeezing the shutter release . . .
“Concentration, consternation, trepidation. Imagination. Exhilaration. Click.
“The loudest ever heard. An Olympic starting gun. Thundering explosive hooves. Crashing bush alive with frenzy — every direction, everywhere. Forget the four! There must be fifty or more, a huge herd, all around. None of them knowing why or what. Galo-Galo was pulling me, tugging me around the tree. Haraka. Hurry. Fwata mimi. Follow me. We raced off again, triumphant, now circling around.
“Snorting the air, noses were blowing. Then a giant lion-sized coughing, BARK, an explosion — like a buffalo bull, a lion, a leopard — brief, inquiring, a loud calling out. Nothing quite like it. The fearsome utterance sounded again, and then again. We pursued it, madly crazed. The forest cover got darker but the ground was open, with movement all around; the great hollow bark was just ahead. I checked the aperture: F 3.5 still in place. Speed down to 1/60 of a second. And then there it was in the gargantuan silhouette: buffalo-sized, frozen in place, almost calm, the biggest blackest bongo bull in the forests of Africa. This was the high point of a thousand lives, a million-to-one odds. Great blackness and sleekness and togetherness and gentleness in the darkest black baseball-sized eyes . . . looking right down at me, completely open without fear or malice of any kind. Visual poetry of vast composition, purring muscle. Fluid, ready. Mighty.
“The whole form filled my lens — the hunter’s dream. Click — and he disappeared into the moist darkness, an apparition.
“I left the film advance on motor drive, left eye open. By now the herd was out of sight.
Deep silence restored. In my left eye the rewind spool remained unmoved, unturned, unbelievable . . . It hit me like a flash through the stomach, aching emptiness and despair — a searing pain — the film was not turning in the camera.
“Try the shutter, wind it, crank it, bang it — nothing moves. I would have to wait till dark to look inside and feel for torn film, sprockets probably ripped.
“Had I missed the goggle-eyed face of flies? Mind searching for reasons with groans of darkest hope. From mountain peaks of ecstasy my mood began to match the gloomy forest. I’d got nothing and I knew it.
“Time for desperate action. Grab the other camera from bewildered Galo-Galo. Change the lenses, run through the forest, find the herd. Find any one of them. Reach the next ridge, lungs on fire. Go for it. Quietly now . . .
“Galo-Galo came up behind. We were all there. You could feel it. Forms were flowing through the bush, slightest rustlings here and there. We would see nothing, though. *@#%)&4@}@&$@!!+=)@!!
“It was darkening now — at the very end of the afternoon. Below me in a vast stretch of primeval forest canopy cover was a single gap of low-lying bush, a clearing of sorts. We watched for anything that moved.
“Just when I was despairing over why old Mungu couldn’t throw us down a single crumb, just when I was really beyond hope and knew all was lost . . . the great elegance appeared in that one and only waist-high clearing . . . barely glancing in our direction, easing by, on his own time. Never a sound, back in the flow, heading up to the left . . . a sleek bongo.
“One last glorious chance. Click. Check the rewind spool, open-eyed. It winds . . . Got you!
“And here he is, a male bongo, in the wild.
“Over the years, no one has ever noticed this picture. No one knows what it is.
“No one could ever guess the months and years of trouble that lay behind it.
“Shauri ya Mungu.” Don’t make too much effort. It’s all God’s plan.”
Indeed. All God’s plan.
Peter Beard: 1938-2020. They were giants then.
©Peter Beard