Feb 25, 2016 - Sale 2406

Sale 2406 - Lot 170

Price Realized: $ 22,500
?Final Price Realized includes Buyer’s Premium added to Hammer Price
Estimate: $ 20,000 - $ 30,000
PETER BEARD (1938- )
I'll Write Whenever I Can, Koobi Fora, Lake Rudolf. Silver print with unique hand applications, including detailed arabesque lines in blood and black ink, Beard's handprint in magenta, blue, and purple ink, and an applied postage stamp in the lower corner, 15 1/4x22 3/4 inches (38.7x57.8 cm.), with Beard's stylized signature, title, negative date, and an initialed and dated notation Salaams, in ink, on recto, and with his copyright Time is Always Now hand stamp on verso. 1965; printed 1990s
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Additional Details

From The Time Is Always Now Gallery, New York, New York; to a Private New York Collector, 2000.

Peter Beard is a photographer well-known for his pictures of Africans and African wildlife. He made his first trip to the continent when he was 17, photographing with a Voigtländer camera his grandmother had given him. In 2013 Beard wrote to Robert Kolker,a journalist for New York Magazine, "I made a life for myself in Africa that was as far as you could possibly get from art school at Yale."

In the 1960s, concurrent with a project about the demise of starving elephants and black rhinos, Beard began creating elaborate, large format photo-collage "diaries" incorporating everything from postage stamps to news clippings to smears of animal blood (though these were hardly an unheard of project for Beard; he had been making diaries with collaged imagery since the age of 12). He purchased Hog Ranch, an encampment outside of Nairobi, in the mid-60s. He continued to live in Kenya for a number of years, before purchasing a property in Montauk in the early 70s, where he continues to reside with his family.

This photograph, entitled I'll Write Whenever I Can, Koobi Fora, Lake Rudolf, may have begun as a part of his series Eyelids of the Morning, a study of crocodiles. Beard's mode of operation--drawing and collaging each print individually--ensures that each image is entirely unique, though several prints may have the same photograph as their basis.

Bowermaster, The Adventures and Misadventures of Peter Beard in Africa, cover and p. 152.

Peter Beard,Taschen, pl. 380.