Peter Beard
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Peter Hill Beard b. 22 January 1938 in New York is a photographer, artist, diarist and writer.
Peter Beard began keeping diaries as a child and, after discovering photography at the age of twelve, used photographs to extend and enhance them. He attended Yale University where he enrolled as a pre-medical student but quickly changed his major to art history. Beard read Karen Blixen's Out of Africa, which inspired him to travel to Africa in 1955 and again in 1960 where he ventured with his mother, who was very interested in safaris. He took many pictures of the wildlife there and began putting them into collages and use animal blood and remains along with clippings to create his work. His first exhibition was at the Blum Helman Gallery in 1975. Later, after becoming close friends with Blixen (whom he met in Denmark [1]), he purchased a 43-acre farm in Africa. This piece of land was adjacent to her Karen farm in Kenya at the foot of the Ngong Hills — a property which he named "Hog Ranch". Blixen left him her archive of photographs, as well as some of her personal writings. Beard uses these in his collage diaries.
Beard hails from old money, owing much of his wealth and class privilege to a trust fund set up for him by his grandfather, James Jerome Hill, founder of the Great Northern Railroad in the late nineteenth/early twentieth centuries. Railroads, in part, provided the infrastructure for colonization both in the United States and Africa, promoting expansion into undeveloped frontiers. J. J. Hill made his fortune in the railroad business, leaving as legacy both money and colonialism to his grandson Peter. While not rejecting money from this trust, Beard laments the expansion of Western capitalism into his Africa (choosing to ignore his own privileged existence there as part of this infiltration).
Due to this wealth, Beard has lived a jet-setting lifestyle, and is famous not only for his photographs of endangered African elephants, but also of supermodels and rock stars like Mick Jagger, David Bowie, Iman and Beard's first wife [Minnie Cushing] (both models he claims to have "discovered"). He was also married to the model Cheryl Tiegs.
The crowd Beard hung around with consisted of Andy Warhol, the sister of Jackie Onassis Lee Radziwill, Truman Capote, and Bianca Jagger who all lived and rented houses in Montauk and Manhattan, NY in the 1970s and 1980s. Beard was one of the hangers-on to the infamous Rolling Stones 1972 tour of America.
Beard channels most of his creative energy into his collage-work diaries, which he began to compile in 1949 at the age of eleven. In these works he documents the history of his relationships with (among other things); Africa, Karen Blixen, the New York art scene, the fashion world, Hollywood, and the Kennedy administration. Page after page is covered with photographs of women, transcribed telephone messages, marginalia in India ink, clippings from the daily newspapers, dried leaves and insects, old sepia-toned photographs, drawings of animals and people by Kikuyu artists, quotes by Joseph Conrad, found objects, images of decaying elephant carcasses, and sometimes, Beard’s own blood.
He is now married to Najma Khamm and has a daughter with her named Zara. His most recent book out now is Zara's Tales written especially for her.