Photographer Peter Beard Had An Eye, Heart For Nature

The search for the artist and photographer Peter Beard that had begun on March 31 when he wandered away from his Montauk home ended tragically on Sunday when his body was found in the woods at Camp Hero State Park. Mr. Beard, who had dementia, was 82.

“We are all heartbroken by the confirmation of our beloved Peter’s death,” the family said in a statement, adding, “He died where he lived: in nature.” Mr. Beard is survived by his wife, Nejma Khanum; his daughter, Zara Beard; a grandson; and two brothers.

Peter Hill Beard was born in Manhattan on January 22, 1938, to Anson McCook Beard, a partner at the Wall Street brokerage house Delafield & Delafield, and Roseanne (Hoar) Beard. A great-grandfather, James J. Hill, was known in the press as the “Empire Builder,” having founded the Great Northern Railway in the mid-19th century. A step-grandfather was the tobacco magnate Pierre Lorillard V.

After spending part of his childhood in Alabama, where his father was stationed with the Army Air Forces, Peter Beard was reared on the Upper East Side of Manhattan and Long Island. He began taking photographs as a child and began keeping the eclectic diaries that would become a professional hallmark. At the time, however, his parents’ reaction was, “Good hobby. When are you going to do something worthwhile?” To help this along, Mr. Beard was sent off to the schools his father had attended, including the Buckley School in New York and Pomfret School in Connecticut.

At 17, Mr. Beard made his first trip to Africa, in the company of Quentin Keynes, a great-grandson of Charles Darwin. Despite being chased up a tree by an angry hippo he was trying to photograph, Mr. Beard fell in love with the continent. In Kenya, he was introduced to the last of a generation of big-game hunters and went shooting with both a gun and a camera. When he returned to Kenya the summer after his junior year at Yale University, many of the photographs he took then would be reproduced in “The End of the Game,” a pioneering book in both photography and species preservation.

After graduating from Yale in 1961 and a short stint at the J. Walter Thompson advertising agency, Mr. Beard traveled to Denmark. There he met and photographed Karen Blixen, who, under the pen name Isak Dinesen, had written the 1937 memoir “Out of Africa,” a book Mr. Beard cited as a deep influence. He later bought 45 acres in the countryside outside Nairobi, abutting the coffee farm on which Ms. Blixen had lived.

When “The End of the Game” was published by Viking Press, most reviewers praised the dynamic photographs and the thesis that the game preserves meant to safeguard elephants were unintentionally contributing to their destruction. Reviewing the volume in The New York Times Book Review in 1965, J. Anthony Lukas wrote that the “portraits of the animals themselves — alive, dying and dead — are superb. These are not ‘pretty’ Walt Disney shots of gazelles leaping through the meadows or parrots chattering in the jungle greenery. Beard’s pictures catch all the saw-toothed savagery of the animals who must show each day that they are fit to survive.”

Mr. Beard brought his thesis home even more starkly in subsequent editions of “The End of the Game,” which contained his later aerial photographs of the ravaged Kenyan landscape. In those images, elephant skeletons litter the parched earth like gleaming ghosts. Though Mr. Beard maintained homes in Manhattan and Montauk, he lived and worked in Kenya for long periods. In the mid-1970s, walking down a Nairobi street, he spotted Iman. He introduced her to Wilhelmina Models, the New York agency, and her career was born.

Mr. Beard’s first marriage, to Minnie Cushing, ended in divorce, as did his second, to the model Cheryl Tiegs, to whom he was married in the 1980s. He married Ms. Khanum, the daughter of an Afghan diplomat, in 1986.

Mr. Beard lived in Montauk for decades — but almost didn’t. In 1977, while he was in New York City, an oil furnace exploded at his Montauk home. The house was destroyed, along with paintings by Warhol, Bacon and Picasso and decades’ worth of Mr. Beard’s photographs and diaries. And then he almost did not live anywhere: In September 1996, while picnicking near the Kenya-Tanzania border, he was charged by an elephant. The raging animal ran a tusk through his leg, narrowly missing the femoral artery. Using its head as a battering ram, it crushed Mr. Beard, breaking ribs and fracturing his pelvis in at least a half-dozen places. By the time he arrived at the hospital in Nairobi, according to news reports, he had no pulse. Doctors revived him, but damage to his optic nerve left him blind. He was told that he might never walk again. He eventually regained his sight and the ability to walk. He underwent further surgery in New York and lived ever after with more than two-dozen pins in his pelvis.

In addition to his travels and his books, Mr. Beard is remembered for presiding over gatherings in Montauk, before and after the fire. Guests included musicians such as members of the Rolling Stones, artists, actors, writers, models and other members of the fashion industry, and various celebrities in other fields. He was also a familiar face at popular New York City nightspots in the 1970s and ’80s.

As he aged, he did not grow out of the playboy and bon vivant reputation. A profile by Leslie Bennetts published in Vanity Fair in 2007 began, “Whether he’s at a New York nightclub or deep in the African wilderness, world-famous photographer and artist Peter Beard is surrounded by drugs, debts, and beautiful women. On the eve of a major retrospective of Beard’s work in Paris, the author finds the man described as ‘half Tarzan, half Byron’ weighing his future at Hog Ranch, his Kenyan Shangri-la.”

In later years, Mr. Beard became famous for embellishing his photographic prints with ink and blood — either human (his own) or animal (from a butcher) — yielding complex, cryptic, multilayered surfaces. According to The New York Times, he was also known for the idiosyncratic, genre-bending diaries that he had kept since he was a boy — profuse assemblages of words, images and found objects like stones, feathers, train tickets and toenail clippings — and for the large, even more profuse collages to which the diaries later gave wing. Mr. Beard received solo exhibitions at such prestigious venues as the International Center of Photography in Manhattan and the Centre National de la Photographie in Paris.

But Mr. Beard remained at least as well known for his swashbuckling, highly public private life. “Even by the dashing standards of wildlife photography, his résumé was the stuff of high drama, full of daring, danger, romance and tall tales, many of them actually true,” The Times reported. “Had Mr. Beard not already existed, he might well have been the result of a collaborative brain wave by Hemingway, F. Scott Fitzgerald and Paul Bowles. He was matinee-idol handsome and, as an heir to a fortune, wealthy long before his photographs began selling for hundreds of thousands of dollars apiece.”

After Mr. Beard was reported missing late last month, there was an extensive search involving helicopters, drones, dogs, and more than 75 police and fire officials as well as relatives, friends, and neighbors. Searchers combed the area, much of it densely wooded, in and around Mr. Beard’s 6-acre compound in Montauk. The property, where Mr. Beard lived with his wife, features a series of cottages, including Mr. Beard’s studio, and is adjacent to the 754-acre Camp Hero State Park on Montauk Point. It was within this large tract of land that a body was found last Sunday afternoon that soon was identified as the remains of Mr. Beard.