Like most people, I first came to know the legend of Peter Beard, through the image he projected in his photographs from remotest Kenya – scribbling in his journal while hip deep in a Nile crocodile, say – a safari-jacketed image like something out of silent pictures. ‘Half Tarzan, half Byron’, as the editor of Interview magazine, Bob Colacello, once described him.
In the early 1960s, when he was in his mid-twenties, Beard released his totemic book The End of the Game, a meditation on the natural world, on colonialist East Africa, and on his own self-mythology somewhere therein. And this myth, and this image of a sort of post-colonial adventurer with movie-star looks, society girlfriends, and rock star buddies, made Beard a central character on the moodboards of brands and magazines from then on, made him a de facto pioneer of the kind of world- and brand-building that defines our visual and commercial age.
