Art, Photography Peter Beard
Peter Beard was a Tommy Hilfiger ad before the fashion designer was ever born, a male Audrey Hepburn, a fashion iconoclast cross-bred with Indiana Jones and James Dean. He has been married to a supermodel and has called Jackie O, Warhol and Capote his pals, and thanks to the blue blood that runs in his veins, it is hardly a risk to label his life as jet set.
With such labels, it might be difficult to grasp the reality that Peter Beard is an American photography legend. Difficult only until you see his work.
Beard’s creative juices flow into his collage-work and diaries. As a child who was transfixed by the captured memories that photographs bring, the diaries began to amass at an early age. Eventually, Beard was inspired to take a pilgrimage to Earth’s Cradle in 1955 upon digesting the literary giant Out of Africa. Snapping endless photos of the wildlife and nature, he began putting them into collages, employing animal blood and remains aside newspaper clippings to craft his images.
From there, his personal life, the glittery worlds of fashion, Tinseltown and rock and roll, intersected in the ultimate juxtaposition, with everything from the invasive Western colonization of Africa to the Kennedy reign and the New York art scene. In Beard’s eccentric creations, which continue today, he uses everything from India ink, dried leaves and insects, his own blood even, to portray the world as seen through his textured, often crowded eyes. Sometimes controversial, always fascinating and diverse, Beard’s work shows him to be both a hunter and a gatherer; a hunter of life, a gatherer of subject. The camera, it is merely a base tool to the stories he weaves.
Peter Beard’s enduring sculptures of his passage in time are already a genius collective, a national treasure. On his walls, he holds an Art History degree from Yale University, where he enrolled in 1957, but even at such a refined institution, it is hard to imagine Beard as the student;
Peter Beard is a student of life and culture. Art, a trivial thing to calculate, is embodied in everything Beard touches.
It is with irony that Peter Beard was able to so eloquently capture the essence of all that entered his lens. If someone was to photograph the man himself, they would certainly snare the aesthetics of a rugged and handsome man, timelessly cool. But no snapshot of Peter Beard can ever unfold the story of the icon- well traveled, well versed, well lived.
Maybe there is an art to his elusiveness as well.
Reader Comments (1)
A remarkable talent.