Peter Beard brings together the intertwined practices through which Beard fashioned his public and artistic world: wildlife photography, fashion, travel, diary-keeping, collage, and the collecting of everyday materials. Published by TASCHEN in 2013, the book ranges from Kenya’s landscapes and animal populations to portraits and encounters involving figures from art, literature, and fashion. These subjects are not presented as separate careers. They form a single, deliberately porous body of work in which observation and autobiography continually overlap.

Beard’s engagement with Kenya provides the book’s gravest thread. After settling there in the early 1960s, near the home of Isak Dinesen, he witnessed rapid population growth place increasing pressure on limited resources and wildlife. His photographs recorded the consequences, including the mass deaths of elephants in Tsavo. The directness of these images is complicated by the way Beard reworked them: contact sheets, newspaper fragments, found objects, drawings, handwriting, typed notes, and, at times, animal blood accumulate across the photographic surface.

This combination of evidence and intervention distinguishes Beard from a conventional wildlife documentarian. A photograph may function as record, raw material, and memory at once; the diary page becomes both an archive and a composed image. The book also places this environmental work alongside his fashion photography and his associations with artists and writers, revealing how readily his practice moved between African fieldwork and an international cultural circle.

This 2013 hardcover condenses into one volume a project TASCHEN first issued in two volumes in 2006. Revised by Nejma Beard and expanded with previously unpublished images, it offers collectors a substantial account of the artist’s working vocabulary rather than a narrow selection of standalone photographs. Its significance lies in that breadth: it preserves the friction between documentary urgency, personal mythology, and the materially layered page that is essential to understanding Beard’s contribution to photographic bookmaking.