Friday, December 19, 2008
Peter Beard, Not One Of Us
Peter Beard is an aristrocratic anthro quasi-mystic photographer, pop culture figure and jetsetter. He is the subject of a documentary film directed by Guillaume Bonn & Jean-Claude Luyat, Peter Beard: Scrapbooks from Africa and Beyond that came out a couple of years ago that I had a screener for but didn't get around to watching until our current snowbound extravaganza.
His online biographies don't mention his parents really because they don't have to. His great grandfather was James J. Hill the railroad magnate. His grandfather was
Pierre Lorillard IV who brought the world Kents and Old Golds. Great-grandfather messed around with art, grandfather was big on horses. This fourth generation after Hill is famous for dabbling in issues and imagery of Africa, high fashion photography and having famous friends.
One of these early on, was Karen Blixen (aka Isaak Dineson) who wrote Out of Africa about her experiences on a farm next to some land that Beard later purchased and used as his basis for much of his African activities. He also had a lengthy relationship with Frances Bacon who used Beard as a portrait subject.
I remember his images of elephants on the cover of Life magazine back in the sixties. In 1996 he was mauled by an elephant that crushed a hip and, if the implication of the Scrapbooks video is correct, moved him on a track towards becoming a family man on Montauk.
His photography of natural wonders in Kenya is impressive enough on its own. I sure don't respond to any of the rest of his work. His collages seem crafty and pompous. He kept his jetset meddle alive for years after the Stones/Bowie/Warhol party was over by taking high end fashion and nude models and placing them among Massai or other native people in Kenya. That just feels exploitative to me. As is his practice of having Africans paint imagery on the frames on his his prints a process he calls "authenticating it with the African whatever it is. It isn't illustration." Then there is his practice of painting with blood, sometimes his own.
I spent seventy five minutes getting annoyed by this guy in this video. I hate the way that practically everything that comes out of his mouth seems to come from special mountain top. His life comes off as a kind of privileged mixtape without a individual enough center to make most anything that surrounds him feel original at all.
posted by well-executed buffet at 8:34 PM
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