Peter Beard

The Time is Always Now, New York

Private Collection

Christie’s London, 13 November 2007, Sale 7434, Lot 108

Peter Beard, The End of the Game (New York, 1965), frontispiece

Peter Beard, The End of the Game (New York, 1977), unpaginated

Peter Beard, The End of the Game: Last Word from Paradise (San Francisco, 1988), p. 12 (variant)

Peter Beard: Fifty Years of Portraits (Suffolk, 1999), p. 171

Peter Beard (London, 2008), pl. 5 

Peter Beard, vol. 1 and 2 (Cologne, 2008), slipcase cover and unpaginated (variant)

This elephant composition is an important image in Peter Beard’s first book The End of the Game, first published in 1965. The majestic animal’s attempt to grasp the last branch of a tree foreshadows the severe die-off of more than 30,000 elephants that occurred in Tsavo shortly thereafter. This massive slaughtering was overseen by Kenya’s National Park service in an attempt to control the elephant population.

On the reverse of the frame are Centre National de la Photographie and Carnets Africains stamps. Beard’s first major retrospective Carnets Africains, curated by Robert Delpire and Peter Tunney, was held at the Centre National de la Photographie in Paris from November 1996 to January 1997. The exhibition was restaged at The Time is Always Now Gallery in New York in 2000.