From Christopher Barnard’s interview with Peter Berlin for Paper Magazine:
To a certain generation, the name Peter Berlin evokes an image of strutting ’70s male sexuality, all overstuffed leather pants, and blond Prince Valiant hair crowning a body of rippling, tanned muscles. Born Baron Armin Hagen von Hoyningen-Huene, Berlin would come to personify the sexual freedom and insouciant attitude of an era with his gay cult sex films like “Nights in Black Leather” and “That Boy” that chronicled the very real encounters he based an entire life pursuing and perfecting. His relationships with the likes of Robert Mapplethorpe and Andy Warhol also established him as one of the more compelling figures of the moment, where hedonism for its own sake seemed to be a perfectly acceptable existential end.
In addition to his films, his series of self-portraits furthered his sex god status and could be argued as a pre-cursor to the selfie, if fully produced and knowing in their Narcissus quality. These images are now the new subject of an exhibition at ClampArt gallery in NYC, which opened last week, an occasion that provided the chance for us to talk to the man behind them. Now preferring to live a quiet life in San Francisco, coincidentally among the streets he used to prowl so famously, Berlin, now in his 70s, talked to us about the personae he created, his brief return to New York, and his first few weeks on Facebook.
Browse the exhibition “WANTED” at ClampArt
Browse all of Peter Berlin’s work at ClampArt