Peter Beard

Peter Beard

the only true paradise is a paradise we have lost

interview by BILL POWERS
portrait by RYAN MCGINLEY

All photos © Peter Beard, courtesy of the Peter Beard Studio / Art + Commerce

 

Peter Beard has been visiting and photographing the African wilderness since 1955. As the heir to a railroad fortune and a graduate of Yale University, where he enrolled as a pre-medical student, he became convinced early on that humans are the most threatening disease of all. “The idea of growing up has never occurred to me,” says Beard, who, after decades of travel and a self-imposed exile in the South of France, has recently returned to Driftwood Cove, Long Island. Now the prolific septuagenarian photographer is at work on several books, including a time capsule spanning the second half of the 20^th century, and trying to make sense…