The images in Gregory Colbert’s Ashes and Snow remind us that animals have always had a mystical place in the world of humans.

Started in 1992, Ashes and Snow is a long term project in which photographer and film-maker Gregory Colbert works towards “rediscovering the common ground that once existed when people lived in harmony with animals.” Colbert has created a set of romanticized images of people interacting with wild animals in a largely mystical ambiance.

The whole project – a set of images of people interacting closely with wild animals – has a sense of unreality. Yet it is this very unreality that, in its metaphorical approach, transports us somewhere that generates a strong feeling of human-animal connection.

Looking at these images makes us all feel, at some level, that we would like to be able to interact with these wild animals in this way ourselves; to be able to get close and intimate with these spectacular beings.

But of course, in our cities and suburbs, we have all become remote from animals and, in a modern, techno-scientific world, all mystical connection with animals has been broken. In this way, Colbert’s work harks back to a lost world that, however hard we try, we are likely never able to regain.

Ashes and Snow is a large scale traveling exhibit that has already visited many major cities and has won near-universal acclaim and recognition and many awards.

In a modern world with its ever-increasing distance between the human and the natural, we cannot regain what Gregory Colbert has shown us that we have lost – part of our human soul. The only question is how much more are we willing to lose.

“ When I first went to Kenya in August 1955, I could never have guessed what was going to happen. ….. it was authentic, unspoiled, teeming with big game — so enormous it appeared inexhaustible. 

Everyone agreed it was too big to be destroyed. Now Kenya’s population of over 30 million drains the country’s limited and diminishing resources at an amazing rate: surrounding, isolating, and relentlessly pressuring the last pockets of wildlife in denatured Africa.

The beautiful play period has come to an end. Millions of years of evolutionary processes have been destroyed in the blink of an eye.”

His first works were in the form of more-or-less “straight” documentation of the process of destruction.  This was not conservation photography mediated through a romanticized view of nature and wilderness.  Rather the images were a powerful testament to the impact of man’s interaction with his environment.

Though these initial images were powerful and shocking, Beard soon moved on to the use of complex collages and detailed diaries.  Here he juxtaposed writings, images, paint, found objects, newspaper clippings, drawings, insects or animal bones and often his own blood to create powerful and mesmerizing artworks.

Increasingly complex, Beard’s large collages contain many, seemingly unrelated images.  Yet they are put together in a way that creates a feeling of violence and destruction.  The same intensity of feeling emerges from his tightly packed diary pages.

As well as his passion for Kenya and it’s wanton destruction, Beard’s life was surrounded by beauty, celebrity and the world of fashion.  Based in Montauk, NY, he was part of an artistic and celebrity circle that included Andy Warhol, Jackie Onassis, Bianca Jagger and many others.  Not restricted to images of elephants in Africa, his photography and collage took in supermodels, celebrities and fashion – sometimes all of them ending up on the same page.

Perhaps this mix of celebrity, fashion and concern with conservation reached its peak when he was commissioned to produce the Pirelli calendar in 2009.

On his web site, Beard describes his career as “Escapism through collage, books, diaries and anthropology“.  Through its broad range of subject matter, Beard’s work maintains a continual sense of action, movement, intensity and power with a strong element of violence – sometimes obvious – sometimes as undercurrent.  Beard is a prolific artist who used his skills to bring much attention to Man’s endless capacity for violent destruction of his own planet.  A vast collection of his work has been compiled in a recent book published by Taschen.