Raised in West Berlin, he had once encountered a man from the East who invited him over for the evening. This was his first sexual experience, and when he woke to walk home in the morning, he was witnessing the construction of the Berlin Wall. “I remember it still very well, despite having a very bad memory. In those days, the city was divided between East and West – there was a wall going through Berlin,” he says. “It was a traumatic situation because the world between them was little, and if you tried to escape, then, you know, they shot you.”
In terms of when he first picked up a camera, Armin likens his process to second nature. “At some point I had a camera and I’m very visual – I just learned to photograph when my sexuality developed and I started to like my own image,” he says. “I got really intrigued by it and I always had a camera for my own enjoyment, to take a portrait – and I never thought that I would show them on the wall of a gallery.” Instead of ideating a career in photography, Armin instead refers to his portraiture as a type of diary. “Just how people write in their diary, I took a picture of myself.”
Alongside a mammoth collection of photographs, paintings and illustrations, he’d also created two films, Nights in Black Leather (1973) and That Boy (1974). With an archive of his life in his hands, of course, he’s had plenty of time to reflect over the years. He’s amazed by how many beautiful portraits there are in his collection, but there’s one thing that he wishes he could have done better. “I should have shown the environment a bit more, like the room I was in, and tried to show the artificial light coming in from the window,” he explains. “But I made the pictures when I felt good – and most of the stuff never saw the light of day.”
As you turn on to the next evocative yet perfectly poised portrait, one after the other, you can witness his journey in time – both stylistically and personally. But this is a bygone era and something that will simply serve as a point for musing and celebration. “Peter Berlin, he has died, he’s gone, and the person you’re talking to now is only connected with the Peter Berlin archive,” says Armin. “I’m living a completely different life right now, and I will look in the mirror with a completely different feeling of when I looked the 70s – when it gave me great pleasure.” He concludes: “We’re all getting old, and I’ll tell you, I think this is the biggest fault of creation. We are young and beautiful and we don’t even realise it.”
Peter Berlin: Icon, Artist, Photosexual is published by Damiani.