¡Buen Vivir! Gallery for Contemporary Art, Buffalo, NY

9 October 2015 – 17 December 2015

All photographs by Orin Langelle

In the fall of 1977 artist and photographer Peter Beard had his first one-person show at Manhattan’s International Center of Photography. The show was called The End of the Game – The Last Word from Paradise.

Over four months, Orin Langelle photographed Beard and the people, many celebrities, that were part of Beard’s life prior to and during the exhibit’s installation and opening, plus Beard’s 40th birthday party at Studio 54 in January of 1978.

In 2015, with the support of the Peter Beard Studio, the ¡Buen Vivir! Gallery for Contemporary Art in Buffalo, NY presented this exhibition of Langelle’s work to commemorate the 50th anniversary of Beard’s book, The End of the Game – The Last Word from Paradise.

The book chronicles Beard’s art and photography compiled over the many years he spent in Africa documenting the impact of Western civilization on elephants, other wildlife and the people who lived there. The ICP installation consisted of Beard’s photographs, elephant carcasses, burned diaries, taxidermy, African artifacts, books and personal memorabilia.

In the early 60s Beard worked at Kenya’s Tsavo National Park, during which time he photographed and documented (illegally) the death by disease and starvation of over 35,000 elephants and 5,000 Black Rhinos.

Beard’s work and commentary shed light onto what happens when ecosystems are disrupted, people who are in balance with nature are pushed off of their land, and from the encroachment of western civilization. That was fifty years ago.

Beard observed and recorded, first hand, that the model of elephant conservation that started in Kenya in the early 1960s was in fact driving tens of thousands of the animals to starvation as they were rounded up into a ‘protected’ park too small for their growing numbers, exacerbated by the outlawing of the traditional indigenous hunters.

He also revealed that overpopulated elephant herds showed cardio-vascular disease, stress and density dependent diseases, exactly what humans are experiencing now. He argued that what happened to the elephants is now happening to humans. “For centuries these bow hunters lived, and lived well, among the elephants and rhinos.

A natural order was established – coexistence – symbiosis! They all were surviving nicely, in balance until the white man came along to save them. The whites staked out protective boundaries, arrested the hunter-gathers and upset the balance. Concentrated populations of reproducing pachyderms overpopulated and overate their food supply. Disaster was then at hand.” — Peter Beard Beard’s perspective on ecological balance was considered extremely controversial among the elite ‘conservation’ community.

Langelle’s work at the International Center of Photography gave him a rare insight into Beard, whose controversial views on ecology then, are just as relevant today.