A LITTLE TASTE OF AFRICA

Nothing says Africa to me quite like the journals of the dishy Mr. Beard.
The beauty, the mystery, the cruelty, the blood and gore of Africa..... It's all there, between the pages of the most exciting journals of our time.

"When you look at his diaries, you think, The man is mad!" - Iman

"The diary habit began back when Beard and Radziwill were lovers and Jacqueline Onassis gave him a leather-bound journal he proceeded to fill with all manner of debris. Year by year, the diaries piled up, overstuffed volumes grotesquely swollen with the detritus of a life, each page densely layered with photographs and an astonishing assortment of other items: tiny rodent skulls, candy-bar wrappers, keys, buttons, flamingo feathers, a pocket from a pair of velvet jeans, peanut shells, dried leaves, plastic cocktail stirrers, a piece of a cereal box, mysterious newspaper headlines (woman saved from slime!), bones and rocks, smears and dribbles of blood (always Beard's favorite artistic medium), intricate line drawings and elaborately inscribed quotations, cigarette butts, rubber gloves, matchbooks, fish skeletons, plastic ketchup packets, a desiccated lizard, a dung-beetle foot—the variety is endless." - quote from an article in Vanity Fair, about Peter Beard, here. It's well worth reading! Beard is quite a spicy character whose story is bound to be made into a blockbuster film one day...... Maybe it's been done already?

"A giraffe is so much a lady that one refrains from thinking of her legs, but remembers her as floating over the plains in long garbs, draperies of morning mist and mirage." - Karen Blixen

All the images are from Peter Beard, a boxed, double volume set by Taschen. I used the kuba cloth as a back drop ( in case you thought it was part of the journal:-)

Visit Peter Beard's website here.