Animal magnetism …
Peter Beard took the epic photo at the centre of this collage in 1972, when he was working on new material for the 1977 edition of his celebrated photobook The End of the Game. In isolation, a careening elephant against the backdrop of Kilimanjaro seems to channel the awe felt by European settlers such as his early idol, writer and big-game hunter Karen Blixen.
Elephant’s graveyard …
The photobook is best remembered, though, for its chilling aerial photography of the corpses of thousands of elephants who died at the Tsavo national park in the early 70s. Around 45,000 elephants had been fenced into half the area they needed. They exhausted the land and starved to death.
Appetite for destruction …
Beard didn’t overlook the elephants as a prophetic mirror for human behaviour. In this typically dense collage, the beast’s nobility is a tragic illusion, masking its capacity for self-destruction. Surrounding it is a relentless drill of sex, death and consumer culture dysfunction: war photography, erotica, imperialist Queen Victoria, Michael Jackson, the Laughing Cow. Smears of blood, one of Beard’s favourite materials, frame the central image.
Into the wild …
Beard wasn’t your average wildlife campaigner. He wanted to preserve nature, but dismissed environmentalists as “guilty people on Park Avenue”. When in Kenya he documented crocodiles and elephants, tickled his warthogs and smoked pot on his Kenyan farm. In Europe and the United States, this beneficiary of a multi-million-dollar trust fund shot fashion photography and partied hard. His circle included artists such as Andy Warhol (he was memorably described by Warhol’s biographer as part-Tarzan, part-Byron) and Francis Bacon.
Lose yourself …
It is hard to separate the spirit of his work from his outlandish life. When the photographer, who had dementia, died last month after disappearing in East Hamptons woodland, the band Garbage perhaps summed it up best when they remembered him as a “fabulous creature”.
Peter Beard, by Peter Beard and Nejma Beard, is published by Taschen
