Peter Beard (on ladder) and Marvin Israel at ICP, 1977 – photo by Orin Langelle

One of the first jobs I had in New York while attending Cooper Union was as a part-time exhibition installer at the International Center of Photography. As fate would have it the first big show I worked on was the infamous Peter Beard extravaganza “The End of the Game.” It was quite an introduction to the New York world of money and glamor. Beard was a lanky, blond, dashing adventurer/photographer who championed the cause of protecting the wild game of Africa, elephants in particular. He died recently on Montauk at 82, suffering from dementia he wandered away and was missing for a number of days before his body was found.

Peter Beard retrieve tattered mural (that’s me on the far right) – photo by Orin Langelle

In 1977, ICP was housed in a mansion on 94^th Street on the corner of Fifth Avenue. It was a beautiful space for photography, though difficult to work with because its interiors, including wood paneling and wainscoting, had to be preserved. Guest designer extraordinaire Marvin Israel was brought in to transform the galleries into an immersive environment with floor pieces and tableaus evoking the African savanna, and on the outside corner of the building, a giant JR sized black and white image of an elephant. The wind blew it down shortly after its mounting, and much hilarity ensued as we ran out into Fifth Avenue collecting the tattered shreds of canvas.

Beard was present and hands-on throughout the installation of the exhibit often with one or more fashion models in tow, and the buzz about him was palpable. To his credit, he was very nice to those of us working on the show. But let me just say that this exhibit was one absolutely over the top mishegoss, a funhouse display of Beard’s elaborate diaries, photographs, collected objects, and the charred remnants of his archive largely destroyed in a house fire. There was something deeply disturbing to me about the whole enterprise, not the least of which was the way that Beard came off as a great white hunter, albeit with a camera, who while acting to save the animals of Africa was simultaneously romanticizing and fetishizing an Africa that we would now characterize as a neo-colonial western perspective.

Andy Warhol at the Peter Beard opening at ICP – photo by Orin Langelle

The opening at ICP was a mosh pit of the rich and famous including Jackie Kennedy, Kurt Vonnegut, and Andy Warhol. That was the closest I ever got to Warhol until a few years later when one of my photographs was hung next to one of his prints in the Metropolitan Museum of Art. But I digress. Larry Fink, one of my professors at Cooper photographed the opening and made some great images. I guess everybody headed for Studio 54 after that – I ended up back at my tenement on East 4^th Street. The things is, I could not understand what the whole whoop-de-doo around Peter Beard was all about. I still can’t.

Peter Beard opening at ICP – photo by Larry Fiink

Even in death, his mystique continues. The Times in an obituary for the ages described him as “as an amorous, bibulous, pharmaceutically inclined man about town.” I came across a piece by Anna Winand who was Cornell Capa’s (director of ICP) assistant who describes his presence in the same melodramatic fashion: “His wild African energy was overwhelming; when he was at ICP the building shook.” I don’t remember any shaking myself, but she then recalls an incident that I was very much a part of. She writes: “What I do remember is Peter asking me to call the Central Park Zoo for elephant turd. I did, we got some, and Peter placed a pile in each of the two fireplaces.”

I was the guy who went and fetched the elephant turd from the zoo. Two green trash bags of it.