Monumental in scale, Elephants on the Tiva Lugga is the quintessential work by Peter Beard, combining his compelling photographs from East Africa with vibrant unique elements. The focal point of the assemblage is Beard’s black-and-white photograph titled Elephants on the Tiva Lugga from 1965, created the same year as the publication of his landmark book The End of the Game. The central photograph alone stretches an impressive nearly five feet across, and the margins are richly illustrated and collaged with a visual explosion of animal and human figures, symbols, and colors.

This unique presentation offers a mirrored image of his well-known photograph depicting a herd of elephants and buffalo navigating the dry riverbed (known as a lugga in Kenya). Here, Beard refers to the scene as ‘A Pleistocene Moment’ with his annotation at the lower edge of the photograph. He references the illusion of an untouched, millenia-old African landscape furnished with diverse wildlife. Beard thoroughly documented this misconception of the pristine African landscape in his seminal publication The End of the Game, photographing the ecological destruction of elephant populations while working in Kenya’s Tsavo National Park in the early 1960s.

“It does the heart good to see what nature has made available to us…Nature is the best thing we’ve got.”
- Peter Beard

Throughout his prolific career living between Kenya and New York, Peter Beard documented the changing African landscape in powerful photographs, which inspired his complicated unique compositions. Around the same time, Beard acquired Hog Ranch, an expansive 45 acre property adjacent to the home of writer Karen Blixen (widely known by her pen name Isak Dinesen). In this compound outside Nairobi, which Beard nick-named the Hog Ranch Art Department, several talented artists embellished his photographs with intricate paintings and drawings.

DETAIL OF THE PRESENT WORK.

In the present work, the scores of illustrations by Kenyan artist E. Mwangi Kuria range from whimsically imagined vignettes, such as three elephants hoisting a bus in the air, to tensely charged scenes of colonial hospitals with patients in wheelchairs. Between the illustrations, ink stippling in a rainbow of colors adorns the entire page. The collage includes elements such as matchbooks and newspaper clippings coupled with recognizable faces like Beard’s portrait of Karen Blixen and a magazine cutout of popstar Britney Spears. Each viewing of this impressive work reveals previously unseen visual information that further enhances the powerful photograph.

“I like things that don’t look like you’re in control. It’s like life itself. You just learn how to benefit from accidents and chances that you take…There are so many things you can photograph–the motion, the accidents. I’ve always thought it was magic. Photos can be magic, if you have a little accident involved.”
- Peter Beard