Additional Images

Provenance:

Gift from the Artist to AMREF Health Africa - Canada, 1999
Private Collection, Toronto, ON

Note:

Peter Beard grew up in an environment that venerated art and nature. His family, heirs to the Great Northern Railway Company, settled in Montauk, New York in the late 19th century and amassed a large collection of realist paintings. The desire to depict the reality of nature in all its glory and suffering inspired Beard in his own career in photography, where the artist would carefully document diminishing wildlife populations throughout the African continent.

Harbouring an interest in naturalism in his youth, Beard began collecting and scrapbooking elements of nature he found indelible – leaves, animal skins, bone, and blood. The artist’s draw to nature led Beard to travel across Africa at age 17, Voigtlander camera in hand, with the great-grandson of Charles Darwin, Quentin Keynes. (1) The awe-inspiring trip would be the first of many for the photographer as he would take up residence in Kenya and begin to note the brutal, rapid decline of the wildlife population.

Beard took particular interest in the Tsavo River region of Kenya, where he befriended the warden of Tsavo River East National Park, Bill Woodley, in 1961. Encountering the likes of hunters, poachers, and nature conservators, Beard quickly noted the unsustainable environment inhabited by the elephants and photographed his findings in his 1965 book “The End of the Game – Last Word From Paradise.” The book would bring the photographer international acclaim from fellow authors and artists including Kurt Vonnegut, The Rungstedlund Foundation, Salvador Dalí, and Francis Bacon.

“A Bend in the River After the Die Off,” 1976 by Peter Beard is one of the artist’s most iconic and well-known images – depicting the few surviving elephants of the Tsavo River National Park drought in the 1960s and ‘70s. In this particular work on offer, Beard draws on his childhood journaling by personalizing the print via annotations with collage elements and recollections from his time spent in the Tsavo River region. When preparing for the 2013 dedicated auction of his photographs at Christie’s New York, Beard reflected on his experience capturing “A Bend in the River After the Die Off,” 1976 stating: “Kurt Vonnegut told me once that when he witnessed 30,000 people die at Dresden, he felt as though he owned the whole horror, that the weight was on his shoulders. That was the way I felt about Tsavo.”(2) As the devastation continued in the Tsavo River region, Beard would go on to publish the second edition of “The End of the Game” which included the unaltered version of this photograph.

(1) Margalit Fox, “Peter Beard, Wildlife Photographer on the Wild Side, Dies at 82,” The New York Times, April 19, 2020, https://www.nytimes.com/2020/04/19/arts/peter-beard-dead.html.
(2) Into Africa: Photographs by Peter Beard, October 3, 2013, https://www.christies.com/Into-Africa-Photographs-by-24348.aspx.