Published by Doubleday & Company in 1977, The End of the Game is a revised and updated version of a work first issued in 1965. Closely associated with Peter Beard, the book examines the origins, history, and prospects of Africa’s big game, with particular attention to the widespread destruction of the African elephant. Its subject is not wildlife in isolation, but the human actions that transformed animals, landscapes, and systems of survival.
The book brings together more than 300 contemporary and historical photographs alongside numerous paintings. That breadth gives it the character of a pictorial history rather than a conventional wildlife album. Explorers, missionaries, and big-game hunters appear within the same documentary field as the animals they pursued or encountered, allowing the imagery to trace how successive forms of travel, hunting, and occupation altered the continent.
Its method is cumulative: archival material establishes a historical record, while contemporary photographs confront the consequences of that history. Beauty and devastation are therefore held in unresolved proximity. The African elephant becomes both a specific focus and a measure of a larger rupture, connecting individual images of wildlife to an argument about human intervention and irreversible change.
For a photobook collection, The End of the Game deserves attention for the way it joins photographic authorship to historical inquiry. The 1977 revision also situates the volume between its original 1960s formulation and a later moment in which the documented destruction could be reconsidered. Its significance lies less in the isolated force of any single photograph than in the sustained relationship among image, archive, natural history, and critique.
