Peter Beard

Peter Beard was born in New York in 1938 into a wealthy family, studied art history at Yale, and first went to Kenya in 1955. He bought land outside Nairobi near what had been Karen Blixen's farm, worked in Tsavo through the years when its elephants starved in their thousands, and in 1965 published The End of the Game, a book about the passing of the Africa the colonial hunters had written about. Alongside the photography he kept diaries — thick, obsessive books of pasted photographs, cuttings, pressed insects, handwriting, ink and sometimes his own blood — and that manner spread onto the prints themselves. From the 1970s he was also a fixture of New York society and fashion. He died in 2020.

Almost nothing under his name is a plain photograph, and that is what a valuation turns on. Most works are gelatin silver prints, often large, reworked by hand with ink, paint, collage, found material, handwriting and animal or human blood, so two prints from the same negative can be entirely different works, and the extent and quality of the additions matter more than the image underneath. Unworked prints are a separate and plainer category. Signature and date are usually written into the image. Condition is a real issue: collage elements lift, ink and blood change colour, and the surfaces were never made to be handled. Peter Beard Studio is the reference for attribution.