Vwegba Blogging World

Peter Beard's self-portrait in the mouth of a crocodile, Kubi Fora, 1965. Unluckily for Beard, the crocodile went into rigor mortis and twisted Beard's leg. Despite the incident, Beard successfully created this now beloved self- ... The American writer Bob Colacello once described the young Peter Beard, who has died aged 82, as “half-Tarzan, half-Byron”, By the 1970s, Beard had created a singular formal signature through his combining of photographs, text from his daily journals and all manner of tangentially related found objects from dried leaves and insects to newspaper cuttings. Some of his assemblages were further decorated by animal blood, and sometimes by his own blood. He was a man of often dramatic extremes: a leading character in an adventure of his own making. He saw Africa as the ultimate escape as well as a kind of vocation. In Kenya, his freewheeling lifestyle meant he often courted tragedy. He swam in crocodile-infested rivers and, on more than one occasion, witn...