Lover of Africa, photographer Peter Beard is dead

He was born well, as they said in the past. Peter Beard, 82, disappeared on March 31. Suffering from senile dementia, he was finally found dead near his residence in Montauk, east of New York.

Heir to the founder of the railway company The Great Northern, he spent a childhood safe from want. Which will undoubtedly help a lot to fuel his dreams of escape. Peter Beard is 16 when he discovers Africa by devouring the book Out of Africa. He decides to discuss it with author Karen Blixen. She receives it. There will be a before and after this meeting. The next was the start in the early 1960s for Kenya, where Peter Beard bought a ranch near the Danish writer’s farm.

Photographer, but also artist and writer, he captures the beauty of wild fauna and that of those who live there and who roar there. Like a diary, he sometimes improves his prints by enhancing them with paint, pencil drawings, collages and writing. This is how, thanks to his images, he will alert public opinion to the disappearance of the elephants. Published in 1965, The end of a world tells the story of the land destroyed by the arrival of civilization. In April, Taschen had just republished in a cheap version the collector’s work that the German publisher had devoted to the artist in 2006 and which had been out of print for a long time.

But the photographer of the fields is also a photographer of the cities. When he leaves the savannah, it is to join his property in Montauk, near New York, where he cultivates a very select circle of friends, including Andy Warhol, Truman Capote and Francis Bacon, who will paint his portrait. A jet set that thinks and that its objective captures like the funny zebras of another wild continent.

–

–