Peter Beard’s Snows of Kilimanjaro: a mirror for human behaviour|Art and style|The Guardian

Animal magnetism …

Peter Beard took the epic photo at the centre of this collage in 1972, when he was dealing with brand-new product for the 1977 edition of his popular photobook Completion of the Video game. In seclusion, a careening elephant against the backdrop of Kilimanjaro appears to transport the awe felt by European inhabitants such as his early idol, author and big-game hunter Karen Blixen.

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Elephant’s graveyard …

The photobook is best remembered, though, for its cooling aerial photography of the remains of thousands of elephants who died at the Tsavo nationwide park in the early 70s. Around 45,000 elephants had been fenced into half the location they needed. They tired the land and starved to death.

Hunger for destruction …

Beard didn’t ignore the elephants as a prophetic mirror for human behaviour. In this typically dense collage, the monster’s nobility is an awful illusion, masking its capacity for self-destruction. Surrounding it is a ruthless drill of sex, death and customer culture dysfunction: war photography, erotica, imperialist Queen Victoria, Michael Jackson, the Laughing Cow. Smears of blood, among Beard’s preferred materials, frame the central image.

‘Half-Tarzan, half-Byron’– the extraordinary photography of Peter Beard

Into the wild …

Beard wasn’t your average wildlife campaigner. He wished to maintain nature, however dismissed environmentalists as “guilty individuals on Park Avenue”. When in Kenya he documented crocodiles and elephants, tickled his warthogs and smoked pot on his Kenyan farm. In Europe and the United States, this beneficiary of a multi-million-dollar trust fund shot fashion photography and partied hard. His circle consisted of artists such as Andy Warhol (he was memorably explained by Warhol’s biographer as part-Tarzan, part-Byron) and Francis Bacon.

Lose yourself …

It is hard to separate the spirit of his work from his extravagant life. When the professional photographer, who had dementia, passed away last month after disappearing in East Hamptons woodland, the band Trash maybe summed it up best when they remembered him as a “incredible animal”.

Peter Beard, by Peter Beard and Nejma Beard, is released by Taschen