The artist and 70s sex symbol speaks to Miss Rosen as an exhibition of his steamy self-portraits arrives in New York
“Some people have a passion to climb Mount Everest but my passion was wanting to look sexy,” says artist Armin Hagen Freiherr von Hoyningen-Huene. It was a desire he channelled into the creation of his alter ego Peter Berlin; the legendary libertine who revolutionised fashion, photography and porn in the 1970s.
“When you picture Peter Berlin, you don’t visualise me naked, right?” he asks, alluding to his striking self-portraits, which epitomise sex and seduction. Draping his perfectly chiselled body in handcrafted clothes, Berlin gazed into the camera with cool-blue eyes peeking out under blonde pageboy locks, inviting viewers to revel in the pleasures of denim, leather, flesh – and little else.
While in his twenties, Berlin began designing and making his own sexy ensembles before stepping out to cruise the parks and train stations of Berlin, Rome, New York and Paris. “In the 1960s, gay men were running around the parks and the beaches,” he remembers. “It was a very exciting moment; the longing for a sexual encounter. I didn’t go out to find a lover, like a boyfriend. I just wanted that reaction, the idea of making someone else excited. Sex is the most beautiful invention of nature.”
In 1969, Berlin moved to San Francisco, where he still lives, and began making his iconic self-portraits in order to document his favourite outfits. “Since I’m so visual, most of the information I got in life was with my eyes,” he explains. “I looked in the mirror, put on jeans, spent hours making them fit, and when it looked natural, I wanted to freeze that image.”
Berlin also took photographs after returning home from the beach, the streets, or the club. “Maybe the next morning I was by myself and I was feeling really good, so I took out the camera. I think that’s why the pictures have that impact. What you see is a very honest display of me being sexually excited. It felt right and I wanted to capture it.”
With what he describes as “the great luxury of time,” Berlin could live by his own rules, forging his own path, and delving into the newly legalised realm of pornography. In the early 1970s, Berlin became a gay icon after producing and starring in the iconic films Nights of Black Leather and That Boy, which he also directed.
With the increased visibility, the demand for Berlin’s photographs steadily grew into a mail-order business. With the increase in production, sometimes he would inadvertently underexpose some frames of film. Not wanting to waste any of the prints, Berlin began taking a brush with acrylic and oil paint to enhance the images.
After visiting New York with painter Jochen Labriola, Berlin learned to airbrush his photographs, a technique that came to define the 1970s and 80s. Prefiguring the filters we now see throughout digital photography today, Berlin painstakingly embellished, adorned, exaggerated, and enhanced his self-portraits to make them all the more dazzling.
The new exhibition, Peter Berlin: One of a Kind, brings together the artist’s unique hand-painted self-portraits. “In those days, I didn’t develop colour photos myself so when I got the pictures back, I didn’t want to throw away the pictures that were bad,” says Berlin. “Sometimes I went further. I’d have a perfectly fine photograph and would change the background.”
Chronicling Berlin’s signature style, the photographs prefigure our current love affair with the selfie. But unlike many today, Berlin had no grand aspirations for these works. “Exhibiting these pictures in a gallery was never my thought. It was not that I thought, ‘I want to keep this picture for when I am older to look back,’” he says. “I just kept a diary the same way some people sit on their own and write. Oh, I wish I had written my adventures down, too.”
Peter Berlin: One of a Kind is on view at ClampArt through December 18, 2021.
