David Beatty was born and raised in the UK. In a nomadic career spanning three continents his work has encompassed Editorial Photography including Travel, Reportage, Environmental Stories, as well as Interior Photography, Portraiture, and Public Information Campaigns. After considering a career as a filmmaker he took up photography during a year (1970-1) that was spent running an overland safari across Africa and Asia. In India and North Africa he was assigned to shoot documentary images for development agencies as well as travel pictures for numerous publications.
During the eighties and nineties he developed a career as a Travel Photographer contributing to many books, travel guides (Insight Guides) and magazines on countries such as Greece, Morocco,Tunisia, India, Sri Lanka, Central Asia, and Madagascar.
His pictures have appeared in numerous international journals and magazines, among them Time Magazine, Time-Life Books, The Observer Magazine, The Geographical, GEO, and The Smithsonian Magazine where he published a major story on the displacement of tribals in Central India (1992) due to the ecologically and socially destructive impact of the Sardar Sarowar Dams, part of a vast 50 year hydro-electric project. A selection of these pictures also contributed to Survival International's work.
He has worked extensively in India, and visited Sri Lanka on many occasions for more than a decade (1981-1996) as the country's civil war took a heavy toll, a conflict that ended in 2009 but which has left the nation deeply scarred. A selection of work from those years can be seen in the Gallery: Sri Lanka - Under a Dark Sun.
He has lived in Kenya since 1996, and was contracted by Media24 South Africa from 2004-2010 to shoot the covers and fashion stories for their East African editions including Drum Magazine, pictures which viewed retrospectively capture the playful exuberance of a new generation that came of age in the years of the Kibaki government.
He has continued to engage with environmental photography projects that focus on marginalized communities threatened by climate change and ill-conceived development projects. His photographs of the Tana River Delta and of the Pokomo and Orma people formed part of an exhibition and documentary film on the ecology of the Tana Delta by ecologists Olivier and Stephanie Hamerlynk which was exhibited by the National Museum of Kenya in 2011 and again for four months in 2012.
Currently he is exploring a more contemplative approach to photographing the natural world and runs nature connection retreats in Laikipia and the Aberdares.