http://www.artsy.net/artist/peter-beard 

In November 2013, Peter Beard, born in 1938 so now aged seventy five, suffered a stroke. This information was conveyed to the press by Njema Beard, his wife, manager and the curator of his legacy. For many years there have been rumours of divorce, accusations of Beard’s sexual involvement with his daughter Zara, of whom Njema is the mother, and yet she is still there, still a part of the end of his game, keeping a living memory of what was, is and what will be. And this story: a short yearning for more, and an understanding of life’s defeat.

I do not know Peter Beard; but I have been captivated by his photographs and the stories of his mythological, wild and insouciant life for a long time. Why, his photographs are colonially transgressive, his diaries are a pop artist’s excitement, his decadent and illusive life is enviable?

Peter Beard, the discoverer of the beauty of Iman; as he wandered the streets of Nairobi he saw this dark splendour, this African icon and introduced her to the covers of Vogue and Vanity Fair.

“He tells the story of how I was a half-starved wretched Somali goat herd; the only true part of it is that I am Somali …. But I am part of this life now, part of this time and this circumstance, but yes, yes, we loved Kenya, Lake Rudolf, a dead illusion for nothing living can ever become a myth, and it is a myth. Peter, he is older now, and so am I, but I remember the days that we spent at the lake. The lake, no-one meddles with this water without paying for it, one way or another, sometimes they pay for it with their lives, we all did except Peter, he will never pay for anything, he is cheap. Peter, yes, he loves the perception of Africa but he has no respect for Africans, he takes their photographs with the eyes of a man, a man who does not understand their culture, it’s their continent, not his. But nothing will change his identity, he is American, he cannot be disloyal to his kind, for him there are no African people; they get in the way of his myth ….. Peter is not a commercial person, that’s his beauty and that’s his downfall. He’s an artist; but he does not live in society; he does not play by their rules. He’s like a wild animal. He would rather have grand disasters than a mediocre life.” (Vanity Fair November 1996)

Nine years ago I bought a book, The End of the Game – The Last Word from Paradise (1996). Underneath the title are the words, “(I) was made aware that it was not the great white hunters that denude Africa of its animals but rather the creation of boundaries and fences and railroads that prevent animals from migrating to other areas for food and water that was the cause of their devastation.” Beard, a hunter himself, was not defending the hunters, but also saying that there was more to animals dying than hunting, it is the structure of capitalist exploitation and its need to expand that cause the destruction of the game, it is not a few bloodthirsty men, but the whole system of acquisition that western society is based upon. The photographs are taken in either black and white or sepia, they show dead lions, dead elephants, exotic hunters, wide eyed children, wild men and roads; they shock, and yet they are captivatingly beautiful. Beard’s book is unsettling, the portraits, in words and pictures, of the devastation that occurred in Kenya’s Tsavo National Park where elephants starved to their death because of encroaching civilization; roads, fences and railroads: “this subject,” says Beard ,“ is necessarily a memory of the past, a record of the present, and an image of the future …… an elephant reaching for the last branch of a tree, a vestigial giraffe plodding out of the picture, its legs lost in mirage.”

Peter Beard bought and lived at Hog Ranch, a tented magnificence, in the suburb of Karen in Nairobi. Beard’s ranch adjoined the land once owned by Isak Dinesen, the Danish countess; writer, coffee grower, lover to famed pilot and hunter Denys Finch Hatton and wife to hunter and sexual predator Baron von Blixen. Beard’s view of the Ngong Hills was her view, his waiting was her waiting, his dreams were her dreams, and where he took photographs so she wrote words. The ranch is still there, but there is little left of what it was, the khaki cloth walls of the boutique lodge hold within them journeys and scattered memories, the blurred figures of reminiscence, and many photographs, the mighty tusk of the elephant with Veruschka tilting over its trunk, Iman draped sinuously around the long neck of a giraffe, on the walls. Beard does not return here, there is nothing left of the sound of trumpets and dancing girls; Jackie Kennedy, Isak Dinesen, Bianca and Mick Jagger and Francis no longer walk the grounds and laugh, and Andy Warhol, in a fit of pop art implosion does not cry out amorously, “Peter, beautiful Peter, he has given me many of his beautiful photographs, the most poignant are the ones of decomposing elephants where, over time, as they disintegrate, the bones form magnificent sculptures which is not just abstract forms but have all the memory traces of life’s futility and despair.” (Vanity Fair, December 1964)

“Half Tarzan, half Byron” (Bob Colacello, Holy Terror, The Story of Andy Warhol, 1974) no wonder he was loved by all who surrounded him; Beard, a man who revered, and yet who was always dispirited. “It (Kenya) was paradise, believe me. This was one of the heaviest wildlife areas in the history of the world, and now it’s a parking lot. People think you’re a whiner or a complainer if you mention it, but the speed with which we destroy nature is overwhelming, and we adapt to the damage we cause with unbelievable cunning. Conservation, it is for guilty people on Park Avenue with poodles and Pekingese, they destroyed it, now they want to assuage their guilt.” (Preface to The End of the Game, 1963, revised 1984)

In 2009, one of Beard’s last trips to Kenya, he said, “I could never have guessed what was going to happen. The beautiful play period has come to an end. Millions of years of evolutionary processes have been destroyed in the blink of an eye. The Pleistocene is paved over, cannibalism is swallowed up by commercialism, arrows become AK- 47s, and colonialism is replaced by the power, the prestige and the corruption of the international aid industry. This is ‘The End of The Game’ over and over.” (Nairobi, October 2009)

Then, five years ago I came across a book which contained photographs, or rather bricolages of photographs, his diaries which, according to the introduction, he began when he and Lee Radziwill, Jackie Onassis’s sister, were lovers. Jackie gave him a leather-bound journal which he filled with whatever he found; each page contained photographs and other items: “tiny rodent skulls, candy-bar wrappers, keys, buttons, flamingo feathers, a pocket from a pair of velvet jeans, peanut shells, dried leaves, plastic cocktail stirrers, a piece of a cereal box, mysterious newspaper headlines (woman saved from slime!), bones and rocks, smears and dribbles of blood, intricate line drawings and calligraphies of quotations, cigarette butts, rubber gloves, matchbooks, fish skeletons, plastic ketchup packets, a desiccated lizard, a dung-beetle foot …..” they are bizarre and magnificent. Francis Bacon, Beard’s close friend and admirer said, “(the diaries) are avoidance of art.” They are fragmented and haunting; death and life are constantly juxtaposed in a melange of colour and image, beauty and hideousness sit on the same page, they are an outcry in a helpless world.

Two years ago I went to Lake Turkana where Beard photographed the El Molo women, hundreds of crocodiles and cavorted with Wolfgang Dietler, the taciturn and dissolute owner of the Oasis Lodge, and others of the rich and famous sets.  I sit and talk to Dietler about the days that Beard spent at his lodge; “Bianca Jagger, a beauty, her eyes, aah the last thing left in nature after we have devastated it is the beauty of a woman, Mick Jagger, he was married to Bianca then, and David Bowie drank double gain and tonic with Iman, and Peter Beard, he hung around the swimming pool, the hot springs, calling to my cook who he photographed, together with Russian models, with unsurpassed splendour, look  …”, he points at the pictures on the wall.

Lake Turkana, always jade, always the sea; I imagine Beard walking on the shoreline, he leans down and puts the tip of his finger into the cobalt water and tastes it, as I do, he sleeps in the white that are faded and stained sheets, as I do; I lie on the bed and watch a hot wind blow open the curtains of the burning room, a shadow of what once was outside slouches in, I hears the tinkle of glasses and smells empty bottles which once contained laughter.

“Peter was rakish and I was the German prince of the night,” said Dietler, “I was young then, young and beautiful. I think I fucked Lauren Hutton, she was here with Peter, or maybe I didn’t, I can’t remember, but there is the photograph, she has the lake in the background, this lake, this sea, beautiful, yes, but she was more beautiful. Iman and Peter, look over there, the footprints in the picture, the letter, Iman and Peter, they left their footprints behind …”

“I will always know Peter; the blonde hair, those delicate features with cold blue eyes, his unimpeachable expression,” said Lauren Hutton, “I walked at the side of the lake with him, it was his enchanting stare that always looked past me, the blue eyes that focused on something else, possible the wave of the wind.” (Elle March 1992)

Then, in 2013, a friend gave me the out of print book Eyelids of Morning – The Mingled Destinies of Crocodiles and Men which was hailed by reviewers as “enthralling,” “spectacular,” and “vividly dramatic” when it was first published in 1974.  Alistair Graham, together with Peter Beard spent three years on Lake Rudolf photographing and researching the habits of the crocodiles. It is photographically hypnotizing; the words are philosophically and poetically compelling, the story of how crocodiles’ influence the Turkana people (and us); their myths, symbols and beliefs (and ours).

And a year ago I walked the sweating pavement of New York City to 205 West 57^th street, between 6^th and 7^th avenues, to the apartment block where Peter Beard lives; outside I waited; watching for a glimpse of this man, his shadow, even just his chauffeur. On one occasion the glass doors of the cement and steel structured building opened and an elderly man in a soft white linen suit walked out, maybe?

A vignette is a story; a monograph, picture and photograph, search these vignettes and search some more for searching is a lost art, no-one searches anymore for all that is secret is displayed in the public square, transparency is everywhere. I search further for what Peter Beard photographed and lived for as I know, as he did, “that it is too late to undo what has been done, the laws of inevitability must now be accepted by a continents conquerors. To understand this is to begin to realize that we have conquered nothing at all. And with that very license of humanity by which we have presumed to conquer, we are challenged to reflect upon our defeat.”