Peter beard photographer biography

“I first met Beard in the mid-1970s, and, like many others, was charmed by his aristo’s combination of confidence and self-mockery,” says Owen Edwards in his introduction to Taschen’s book on the artist and adventurer.

“Here was a man who had looked through his lens at charging lions and walked coolly among unpredictable elephants, who slithered through the mud of Lake Rudolf to hunt man-eating crocodiles with a telephoto and a rifle, who wore African sandals on the coldest New York winter days, who spent time with Francis Bacon and Karen Blixen, Mick Jagger and Andy Warhol.”

As well as that, Peter Beard – the collaborator and subject of That Summer, a new film by Göran Hugo Olsson which hits UK screens today – knew Jackie O, Salvador Dalí, Lucian Freud, Iman and Pablo Picasso and spent extensive periods in Montauk, Tanzania, New York, Jamaica, Arles, London and Skorpios.

His improbably charmed life moved effortlessly from Studio 54 to the African savanna.

With his dashing good