Wildlife and fashion photographer delighted in living his own wild life
Peter Beard, who has died aged 82, was an American photographer known as much for his Byronic charm, famous friends and rackety way of life as he was for his influential images of African wildlife, which in the 1960s were among the first to chronicle the increasingly destructive relationship between nature and man.
In 1961, while visiting Kenya, Beard was introduced to Karen Blixen, author of Out of Africa. He bought 45 acres next to her coffee farm in the Ngong Hills and was to base himself at Hog Ranch for much of the next four decades.
One of the conditions of his acquiring the land, imposed by the Kenyatta government, was that he chronicle the changing condition of the landscape.
When Beard had first travelled to Africa, its teeming herds of game had seemed inexhaustible. Over the next few years, while working at Tsavo national park, he began to record the decline in the numbers of elephant, hippo and black rhino, victims of white hunters and of the human expansion that encroached on their habitat.
The first edition of his collection of photographs, The End of the Game, was published in 1965. By the time a second edition was issued a decade later, the losses were in the tens of thousands. He was briefly jailed in 1969 for assaulting a poacher.
Beard’s images, usually black and white, evoked the majesty of Africa, albeit arguably using conventional tropes and, in those that had models posing with tusks or animals, chauvinist ones. Women and wildlife were his inseparable muses, and peril often a theme of his work.
He saw himself in a line that included Ernest Hemingway and the hunter Frederick Selous – Blixen’s estate bequeathed him the film rights to Out of Africa, and her major-domo moved to live at Hog – and this influenced the collage-like appearance of his pictures.
They were often surrounded by extracts from earlier writers or from the diaries Beard had kept since he was a boy – which were later housed in books he was given by Jackie Kennedy. His good looks and air of sprezzatura generated an appeal that led by the 1970s to friendships with the likes of Truman Capote, Francis Bacon and Andy Warhol.
Drugs were by then a daily habit. Following his divorce in 1970 from his first wife, Minnie Cushing, he checked himself into a psychiatric clinic. Friends came to believe he might suffer from bipolar disorder. These troubles proved no bar to an affair with Lee Radziwill, Jackie Kennedy’s sister.
Beard’s disregard for danger seemed only to heighten his attractiveness to women. Among those with whom he had relationships were Barbara Allen and the model and actress Candice Bergen. From 1981 until 1984, he was married to supermodel Cheryl Tiegs.
Beard worked with other celebrated models such as Veruschka and Lauren Hutton, and in the mid-1970s discovered Iman. The truth of other episodes in his life – attacks by lions and crocodiles, being shipwrecked on Lake Rudolf – was opaque. This was also true of his finances. Beard spent much of his life cheerfully in debt and cadging large sums from others. Only his third wife, Nejma Khanum, seemed to have his measure.
The second of three sons, Peter Hill Beard was born in New York in 1938. He grew up in Alabama where his father, Anson, was serving with the wartime air force. Anson, a stockbroker, devoted his life, claimed Peter, to looking after his investments. His son felt equally out of step with his conformist mother Roseanne and as a child sought refuge in the outdoors. Given his first camera by his grandmother, he won a school prize for a photograph of his dog, Charcoal, jumping up at a ruffed grouse.
Peter was educated at the Pomfret School, Connecticut; and then for a year at Felsted, in
Essex. In 1955, with a descendant of Charles Darwin’s, Quentin Keynes, nephew of the economist, he made his first journey to Africa.
Beard returned to Kenya in 1961 after graduating from Yale. He had studied history of art and become influenced by Malthusian ideas on the dangers posed by ever-rising populations.
Until the mid-1990s, he still spent much of his year in Kenya. In 1996, he was injured in Tanzania when attacked by a cow elephant that crushed his ribs and pelvis and slashed his thigh. He thereafter lived largely in America.
Beard was commissioned by Pirelli to shoot its calendar in the Kalahari Desert in 2009, but before then his photographs never fetched high prices. In the last decade or so they have begun to be sold for hundreds of thousands of dollars.
This was attributed in part to his wife taking control of his affairs. Beard had latterly suffered strokes and had been diagnosed as having dementia. On March 31, 2020, he wandered away from his house on Long Island; his body was found in Camp Hero State Park nearly three weeks later.
Peter Beard is survived by his wife and their daughter.
Women and wildlife were his inseparable muses, and peril often a theme of his work.