“The End of the Game,” originally published by Viking Press, made Mr. Beard’s reputation. While a few reviewers took him to task for his seemingly uncritical embrace of the romance of the great white hunter, most praised his dynamic photographs and arresting thesis: that the game preserves meant to safeguard elephants were unintentionally contributing to their destruction.

Reviewing the volume in The New York Times Book Review in 1965, J. Anthony Lukas wrote:

“The portraits of the animals themselves — alive, dying and dead — are superb. These are not ‘pretty’ Walt Disney shots of gazelles leaping through the meadows or parrots chattering in the jungle greenery. Beard’s pictures catch all the saw-toothed savagery of the animals who must show each day that they are fit to survive.”

Mr. Beard’s close studies of wildlife at Tsavo East National Park in Kenya had shown him that the elephant population there, having far outstripped the available food supply, was starving to death by the thousands. Deeming himself a “preservationist,” he argued for the controlled culling of elephant herds, a position that by the 1960s had made many conservationists cringe.

“Conservation,” Mr. Beard once said, “is for guilty people on Park Avenue with poodles and Pekingeses.”

Mr. Beard brought his thesis home even more starkly in subsequent editions of “The End of the Game,” which contained his later aerial photographs of the ravaged Kenyan landscape. In those images, elephant skeletons litter the parched earth like gleaming ghosts.

Ever-Beckoning Kenya

Though Mr. Beard maintained homes in Manhattan and Montauk, he lived and worked in Kenya for long periods. In the mid-1970s, walking down a Nairobi street, he spotted Iman. He introduced her to Wilhelmina Models, the New York agency, and her career was born.