MONTAUK (NYT NEWS SERVICE).- Taking chances has long been second nature to Peter Beard, a photographer and artist who spent decades living and working at his rustic tent camp in Kenya, where he documented both Africa’s natural beauty and its environmental decay.

Beard nearly died on a photography shoot in 1996 when he was trampled by an elephant and he was known to jump into waters to swim alongside crocodiles.

But when he disappeared two weeks ago from his home here, Beard, the adventurer who had honed his survival skills in the wild, was no longer the ageless, daring, physically robust explorer of the past. He was 82, incapacitated by dementia and walked slowly.

Though the police are no longer searching the nearby woods, the hunt for Beard, one of America’s most celebrated photographers, continues even as the mystery surrounding his disappearance deepens.

“We have not given up looking and we are not going to give up,” Zara Beard, his daughter and only child, said in a brief interview earlier this month. The police said they were continuing to follow up on leads.

Beard was last seen at his cliff-side compound of shingled cottages on the tip of Long Island where he has lived for 45 years, a fixture in what was once a bohemian fishing village before it adopted the more glittering trappings of the Hamptons.

His 6-acre property, where the Rolling Stones used to party, is home to Beard’s studio as well as his home. It features sweeping views of the Atlantic, but can be a precarious setting: The drop from the cliff to the ocean is about 50 feet.

Investigators say Beard was last seen outside on the grounds on March 31 at around 4:40 p.m. by his wife, Nejma Beard. Friends and neighbors initially searched nearby, as Peter Beard was known to walk to adjacent properties.

The police, called in to help at 6:25 p.m., began a major sweep. For three days, the search was extensive, as police officers, firefighters, and state park rangers combed a 2-mile grid in the area, much of it densely wooded and thick with briers, leaving red ribbons to mark their progress.

Helicopters scanned the coast.

Investigators also visited the Beards’ Manhattan apartment on West 57th Street just in case, but it yielded no clues, said Capt. Christopher Anderson of the East Hampton Police. There was no indication of foul play, the police said.

Earlier in his life, Beard’s sudden disappearance would not have been treated with such alarm. Handsome and privileged, he was a frequent clubgoer who was quite open about his use of recreational drugs. Even in his 70s, he enjoyed the nightlife at places like Manhattan’s 1 OAK, and when he appeared at stylish boîtes there was invariably a glamorous woman or two at his table.

His companions in artistic and social circles included Francis Bacon, Andy Warhol and Truman Capote, as well as Jacqueline Kennedy Onassis and her sister Lee Radziwill, with whom he had a love affair. His first two wives were heiress Minnie Cushing and model Cheryl Tiegs.

David Fahey, owner of the Fahey/Klein Gallery, who staged several shows of Beard’s and worked on two of his books, said of Beard: “He couldn’t care less about his reputation. He was out to explore the world. He was on a voyage of discovery.”

Nejma Beard seemed tired of discussing her husband’s wild side in 2013 when she was quoted in New York Magazine as saying, “His antics have been chronicled to death in the press. But now that the circus has left town so to speak, he has the peace of mind to concentrate on his work.”

In recent years, the price of Peter Beard’s work has continued to rise. In October 2017, a silver gelatin print collage of orphaned cheetah cubs near Nyeri, Kenya, fetched $672,500 at Christie’s. Elton John owns several important pieces by Beard.

With photographs as his main medium, Beard added paintings, drawings, natural objects and written text to the works, drawing from diaries he’d kept since the age of 8. The finished works often took the form of collages. His portraits of animals functioned as chronicles of his time in Kenya, where he lived or visited over a span of 60 years.

Mesmerized by Africa on a trip there after his college graduation in 1961, Beard bought 45 acres near the Ngong Hills outside Nairobi and established his camp. He befriended and photographed writer Isak Dinesen.

Beard’s work captured the beauty of the natural world and ranged from photographs that documented the near-extinction of elephants to images that celebrated female beauty.

Among his books was a 1965 landmark work on Africa, “The End of the Game,” which he wrote and shot while working for a warden in the Tsavo East National Park, Kenya. Despite his enchantment with Africa, he characterized most environmental conservation efforts there as too sentimental because they failed to acknowledge the toll of human population growth on the animals and the land.

Actor Alec Baldwin, a friend, said, “Beard was someone who went to Africa at a vanishing point in time and tapped into that spirit.” Baldwin, who interviewed Beard in 2012 for a podcast, explained, “In order to sidestep his looks, and his money and his breeding, he wanted to do this work and he succeeded.”

Ruth Ansel, who was the art director for publications like Harper’s Bazaar, The New York Times Magazine, and Vanity Fair, calls Beard “relentlessly curious.” Among her projects with Beard was her startling redesign of “The End Of The Game.”

“He was instinctive and free, yet someone who is keeping secrets.” she said, later adding, “His work is a narrative spectacle, emotionally rich, and visually complex. It exists to disturb as well as reveal beauty in its purest form.”

Ansel said she was working with Beard in Manhattan in 1977 when he learned by telephone that his Montauk home, filled with 20 years of illustrated diaries and an Africana book collection, was burning. He barely skipped a beat and kept on working, she said. The house, with furnishings by the designer Halston, was an old mill that Beard had transported to his property. Everything in it was lost. It was never rebuilt, and he moved into the caretaker’s cottage.

Friends say Beard did not typically carry a cellphone or a wallet, though he was known to leave the borders of his own place. The police and a family spokesman said Beard’s neighbors occasionally encountered him walking alone or with his wife.

But few imagine now that a neighbor is likely to turn up with Beard in tow, bringing him back to his estate where only last month, he was photographed, smiling as he held his first grandchild, Daisy, a girl born seven weeks ago to Zara Beard.

Certainly the conditions would be challenging if he had become disoriented and lost in the woods. Physically, older people are more sensitive to dehydration, a condition that can worsen cognitive impairment, and hypothermia, said Peter V. Rabins, founder of Johns Hopkins Hospital’s division of geriatric psychiatry.

In recent days, his family has spoken out only sparingly about the disappearance, and his wife not at all. But in a statement earlier this week, a spokesman for the family said that, though members “continue to hope and pray for his safety, they have been advised that each passing day darkens the prospect of his safe return. It is most important to the family that at this confusing and uncertain time Peter be thought of as the person he is and the way he has always lived: an extraordinary artist, an insatiable traveler, a hero of the conservation movement, a lover of life, of Africa, of adventure, of his family and friends.”

In a brief interview earlier this month, Zara Beard, 31, had expressed a “bountiful thank you” to those who were helping to search for her father.

“Ultimately, I think the most important thing to relate to anybody is that we love him,” she said. “We love him the way he loved us, which is the way he loved his work, the way he loved life, with passion and with no conditions.”

© 2020 The New York Times Company