Peter Berlin: Icon, Artist, Photosexual

Peter Berlin revolutionized the landscape of gay male eroticism in the tradition of Tom of Finland

Peter Berlin was a self-created icon. With his trademark pageboy haircut and his skin-tight costumes that put every detail of his anatomy on display (designed and tailored by Berlin himself to accentuate his already naturally defined physique), he became a gay sex symbol and a walking work of art.
Cruising was his career, and with a background in photography, Berlin began taking thousands of erotic self-portraits in the parks, train stations and streets of Berlin, Rome, Paris, New York and San Francisco, where he settled in the early 1970s. As Berlin put it, “One day I looked at a camera and said, ‘I have found my dream lover.’”
Berlin’s ’70s and ’80s self-portrait photography graced the covers of gay magazines, defining a look and a reimagined masculinity in a changing gay male culture. Spotlighting Berlin’s significant body of work alongside images by Tom of Finland, Robert Mapplethorpe and Andy Warhol, Peter Berlin: Icon, Artist, Photosexual pays tribute to the man who revolutionized the landscape of gay male eroticism and became an international sensation. The book is designed by Omar Sosa, Creative Director of Apartamento magazine, and is edited by Michael Bullock, writer and publisher of BUTT, Pin-Up, Fantastic Man and Gentlewoman magazines. Carl Swanson, Editor-at-Large for New York Magazine, contributes a biographical text.
Artist, model and filmmaker Peter Berlin, nee Armin Hagen Freiherr von Hoyningen Huene (born 1942), created some of the most legendary erotic imagery of his day. What began as studies in self-portraiture and fashion design in the name of cruising, by the early 1970s had turned into a robust artistic practice that included the creation of two films―Nights in Black Leather (1973) and That Boy (1974)―and innumerable photographs, paintings and illustrations.