Epitaph on Film

By R.H.

Images of ruin in Africa

"The great elephant," Leonardo da Vinci wrote, "has by nature qualities which rarely occur among men: namely probity, prudence, and the sense of justice and of religious observance." Later zoologists in Africa have noticed more human traits in Loxodonta africana --long childhoods and close nuclear families, high intelligence and a habit of wrecking their environment and destroying their own food supply. The suicide ground of the retreating herds of African elephants has been, for the past quarter-century, the Tsavo National Park in Kenya, a place ringed by political (and thus, from the elephants' point of view, irrational) boundaries. This "sanctified ghetto," as a former director of game research in Tsavo bitterly describes it, was an unbroken stretch of umbrella forest only two generations ago. Since then the elephants, condemned to death by overcrowding, have eaten much of the Tsavo down to bare laterite earth. "Where they make a desert, they call it peace"--the ancient Roman epigram is the epitaph to East Africa's conservation policy.

For 20 years, the die-offs in this veritable Auschwitz of earth's largest quadrupeds have been recorded by Peter Beard, an energetic and tough-minded American photographer who spends part of each year on his property near Nairobi. The results of his work are on view through Jan. 22 at Manhattan's International Center of Photography.

This is "concerned" photography, with a twist; for though no living photographer is more obsessed with his subject than Beard, he works out the obsession at a calculated aesthetic distance. Usually that is imposed by the view from a light plane. The most effective images in his mortuary chapel to the elephant (an installation done with gloomy theatrical zest by Designer Marvin Israel) are all taken from above. The huddled corpses with torn mackintosh skin, their bones scattered, their tissues ravaged, are grotesque and pitiful. They are also perversely elegant in the extreme: a ballet of unrecognizable performers, Muybridge's Animal Locomotion in full decay.

Beard has in effect done for the elephant what the painter Francis Bacon --by no coincidence, the two men are close friends -- did to the human body, but with the photographer's edge of documentary truth. It is unlikely that his images will save a single elephant. In a preface to his book The End of the Game (Doubleday; $9.95), whose new edition accompanies the show, Beard argues that the wild Africa of the 19th century is finished anyway, and is already beyond the ministrations of game policy: "It is too late to undo what has been done ... To understand this is to begin to realize that we have conquered nothing at all." To the wild's disappearance, Beard's photos append a haunting requiescat. pending a haunting requiescat.

-- R.H.

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