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For those who know the history of the famous Pirelli calendar, its fame in its early years was for its nude female models. Though Pirelli is an Italian company, the much sought-after calendar was actually produced by its subsidiary in the UK and was not officially sold (though you would probably find collectors’ items on sale on the Net these days).
The calendar series started in the mid-1960s and remained an annual publication till 1974 when the economic downturn of that period forced Pirelli UK to stop producing the calendar. When it was revived in 1984, the concept changed to become more ‘politically-correct’; nudes were out but glamourous models were still a highlight and as before, the photography was superlative.
The 2009 edition of the Pirelli Calendar (the 36th one to be produced) has its setting as the landscape of Botswana. Last May, famed photographer Peter Beard spent 10 days immortalizing seven internationally renowned models. Beard, who lived in Kenya for 30 years, is one of the world's greatest interpreters of the mystery and charm of Africa and was the ideal choice to create the images for the calendar. After last year's China edition, where Patrick Demarchelier artfully juxtaposed the atmospheres of ancient tea houses with the modernity of China's metropolises, the Pirelli Calendar moves to one of the few places in Africa that remain wild and unspoiled, free of the ravages of war and with the highest concentration of wildlife.
Peter Beard has chosen an authentic and ancestral land that is born of the interpenetration of two different worlds: the aquatic oasis of the Okavango River delta and the arid expanse of the Kalahari Desert. A place that has been spared both the exploitation of the land and the impoverishment of its resources, the ideal setting for the photographer's representation of nature as a metaphysical entity, always in motion, source of infinite creativity, within whose rhythms and laws everything must begin and end.
A nature described as powerful yet at the same time wounded, with an harmonic view of the environment that draws on the spirit of 19th-century American naturalism. Through Beard's lens, nature unleashes an angry cry and rebels against humanity's incapacity to combine growth and development with wisdom and respect for diversity. It is in this context that elephants, the real protagonists of this edition of the calendar, struggle to survive, relegated as they are to ever shrinking areas. Elephants as metaphor of the human race, and Africa as metaphor of a devastated world that must recover its lost harmony.
Beard grants no privilege to humans, for he believes that we, just like animals, must respect nature's balance. He imagines for all of us the bitter fate of living in an environment rendered ever more inhospitable by myopic, uncontrolled development, where the quality of life progressively declines and must come to terms with the rebellion of an offended nature.
The only hope is beauty. Beard believes that the key to saving humankind lies in a constant quest for truth and beauty. Beard's women (seven models) are portrayed as generators of life, the source of all things, whose grace remains fully intact. They are depicted as creatures born of nature's womb, heroic, full of strength, with decisive features and powerful movements; statues, symbols of nature's creativity and ability to regenerate itself. "Only beauty can save the world" is the message of the 2009 Pirelli Calendar, in the spirit of Fyodor Dostoevsky.
The final result is a calendar/diary that Peter Beard describes as "a living sculpture". The 56 plates are a rich collage of images, quotations, observations by the artist on the environment, climate change and global warming, overpopulation and the depletion of natural resources. [Article continues after Caltex advertisement]