Peter Beard's life could have given for a second part of 'Memories of Africa' .
Like Karen Blixen, the protagonist, she was born into a " good " family from a rich country. Like Karen Blixen, she fell in love with Kenya and bought a house in the Nairobi neighborhood, which is precisely known as "Karen" by the people of the city in tribute to the writer. Like Karen Blixen, Beard had a love life that she would give for an encyclopedia., and achieved fame for transmitting an image of Africa impeccable from an artistic point of view, although many have accused her of offering a biased vision of a continent that was the only love of her life that did not end badly. Of course, one does not fall in love with things, but with the image one has of things. And, in Beard's case, the image was his life. If Blixen - or, by his literary name, Isak Dinesen - brought Africa to the West through literature, Beard did so with photography.
The corpse of Beard, who achieved enormous fame in the United States in 1965 for his photography book ' The End of the Game ' (a title that means both 'The End of the Hunt ' and ' The Story is Over') , was found on Sunday afternoon by a hunter in a forest in the town of Montauk, in the ultra-exclusive region of the Hamptons, in New York. The 82-year-old photographer had disappeared from the house where he lived with his current wife, the American of Afghan origin Nejma Khanoum (extra romantic detail: Khanoum means "lady" or "princess" in Afghanistan) and their daughter. , Zara, on March 31. Beard's family alerted the authorities, although some people who knew him well did not care. His second wife, the ' sex symbol ' of the 1970s Cheryl Tiegs, told the New York tabloid that she was not surprised by the disappearance. "Maybe he is traveling by car with someone , and they have gone for a ride around the United States. He does pretty crazy things. On our wedding night, he didn't show up until the next morning," he said. Not for nothing, Beard had been frequently described as "half Tarzan, half Lord Byron" : a mixture of adventurer, aristocrat, artist and 'bon vivant' taken from a romantic adventure novel although in reality it was, as he defined himself in 1993, "The Black Sheep of a Wall Street Family."
But this was a very different Beard from the one who was married to Tiegs from 1982 to 1986. Little or nothing was left of Salvador Dalí's friend, Truman Capote, Mick Jagger, Jerry Hall, Andy Warhol and Francis Bacon (and, of course, Karen Blixen ), who went to the bulls with Pablo Picasso, who won a $ 2,000 bet in the sixties on Aristoteles Onassis when he was able to spend more than four minutes underwater holding his breath, and that, among the usual guests of the parties Times he gave in his Nairobi mansion, the Kennedy and Rockefeller clans were in full.
In fact, Beard welcomed the two children of John F. Kennedy , who spent long periods of time there, John ' junior ', who died in a plane crash in 1999, and Caroline, ambassador to Japan with Barack Obama. Being in that mansion is the dream of every child. Beard called it ' The Wild Boar Ranch ', and he had reasons for this: Two dozen warthogs or warthogs lived on the property, a bug weighing about 90 kilos with two pairs of creepy tusks but they were so used to people that they even caressed themselves. The cover of the latest book of photographs of Beard, ' Zara's Tales' ( ' The Tales of Zara ') is a picture of his daughter, who was two years old, playing with a warthog much bigger than her.
That was the Beard that Tiegs remembered. The Beard who left his home in Montauk - the town where another author famous for his animal stories lived, Peter Benchley, the writer of ' Shark ', who turned the fictional town of Amity into the action in a transcript of his locality of residence - he was in decline. He suffered from dementia . He had survived a stroke. His last years were difficult. The court of artists, billionaires and ' celebrities ' who surrounded him in his life accused Khanoum of isolating the photographer from his circle of friends and of taking complete control over Beard's life and work.
RICH OF FAMILY
It is the end of a life marked by excess in everything. Beard was scandalously wealthy , coming from two millionaire families. One had made her fortune on tobacco. The other, on the US railways, at a time when trains were a path to richer wealth, just as the Internet or social networks are now. He was born in New York and raised, as a good member of the elite, between that city and the Hamptons. He went to Yale University , where he graduated in Art, against the wish of his family, who wanted something more 'serious', like Medicine. There, he managed to be admitted to Scroll and Key, one of the ultra-exclusive secret societies of that educational center, which constitutes a true seal of 'designation of origin' that one is a WASP, who is both "wasp" and - and this is the important thing - the acronym for "white, Anglo-Saxon and Protestant", that is, the old elite of the USA. An elite that today has lost the greatest amount of power, but that in the 1950s ruled the first world power.
Beard's artistic life began in those years, with his first trips to British East Africa, the same one that had fascinated Blixen, Hemingway , and which takes the place of a kind of living Eden in the imagination of the West. There, with the great-grandson of Charles Darwin, in the gigantic Tsavo National Park, in Kenya , but near the border with Tanzania, he found the best setting for his art. Tsavo is a dryland dotted with luxuriant oases, larger than the entire province of Badajoz. Its red land makes the elephants that live there famous because their skin is also that color. With that mixture of colors - deep green, red and the blue of a sky from which water almost never falls - it is a photographer's paradise.
Of course, Beard barely used color photos. Only in black and white or sepia. With this material, he produced his most famous book, ' The End of Game' , the subtitle of which makes his objective clear: " The last word from paradise" . It is a narration of how hunting and poaching were progressively annihilating Tsavo, a site in which, at the time when Beard first visited him, there were 5,000 black rhinos, more than all those surviving today in freedom around the world. .
POP STAR
This is how Beard became the banner of the nascent 1960s nature protection movement. But his genius was in the pop and artistic air that he gave to his books. The photographer's works are not mere collections of images. They also include his notes, notes in the margin, samples of local crafts, and sometimes even leaves, animal hair, or their blood. Beard arrived, putting his own blood on some of his volumes. That gave him a status of 'cult' artist, popularizer, environmental warrior and, at the same time, ' pop ' star . The list of his girlfriends - many of them simultaneously with his three marriages - would give for a special edition of this newspaper.
Beard's audience was always in the West. His books barely deal with the abject poverty that surrounds Tsavo, which has so many animals because Arab traffickers from the Kenyan coast exterminated the entire population of the region and took it to Arabia in the 19th century, before the arrival of the British. Just like for Karen Blixen, Beard saw people as part of the landscape, if not a nuisance, or, directly, the enemy that killed their animals to eat them. Her neighborhood, Karen, is very close to Africa's largest shantytown, Kibera, but culturally it's closer to the Hamptons or Hollywood. In his later years, critics say, Khanoum transformed his legacy into a product for mass consumption , while Beard, following his tradition, was unfaithful to every woman who passed by. As he himself said in 1993 to ' Vanity Fair' magazine , "I am the most irresponsible person you can meet."
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