Home

Peter Beard: Primordial Truths
Vito Schnabel, St. Mortiz
February 15 – March 30, 2024

Peter Beard’s work occupies an uneasy place in contemporary art. As a hyper privileged descendant of a family whose wealth was in part derived from the American railroads, one could be excused for possibly feeling an initial discomfort when viewing the artist’s work at Vito Schnabel in St. Moritz. The show brings together a tightly edited group of photographs presented in Beard’s signature embellished frames, a number of which have never before been seen.

The images themselves display a formal beauty while at the same time reading as somewhat simplistic in a photographic sense. Their aesthetic is typical of photojournalism from the time, with the images being characterized by the use of a telephoto lens to separate the subject from the background along with a nostalgia inducing black and white tonal range and visible film grain. While his appreciation of his subject is clearly genuine, the photographs rarely challenge a distinctly Western gaze, clearly inherited. Where Beard finds his voice is not via the images alone but instead through the diaristic embellishments of the border areas and frames.

The challenge here then becomes the viewer’s task of working out what exactly is being generated by this combination of image, text, and illustration. This inevitably leads to an uncomfortable tension given Beard’s position of privilege and his lifelong fascination with Africa, which is impossible to separate from the colonial histories that in part made his work possible. But to the exhibition’s credit, it neither attempts to embellish nor diminish this subtext, instead allowing the viewer to grapple with it.

And perhaps that’s where the work’s true strength emerges. On the surface, we are looking at a body of work that represents a wealthy artist’s own existential struggle with identity. But the deep commitment to such a specific vision gets at something broader, more universal, and that seems to be the degree to which meaning can be derived through some form of struggle, or challenge. In this sense, Beard’s work departs markedly from other artists working with photography who shared similarly privileged upbringing (Lartigue comes to mind), by fore-fronting his ecological vision and thus leaning in, with eyes wide, to the truth of the impact of globalism, something entwined with his personal background.

Long before environmental issues became a topic of global concern, Beard understood that the loss of wildlife and disappearance of ways of living was impossible to separate from our collective future. When given the opportunity, he did not choose to ignore this reality, but instead dedicated his life to confronting it. His resilience and lack of fear in directly facing such complex issues led to the production of an altogether unique body of work that functions both as a highly personal autobiography while also providing a Cassandra-esque window to a future world characterized by impending loss.