Toscana

The opening volume of Matthias Herrmann's Toscana series, a limited-edition artist's book of erotic self-portraits staged in the olive groves and woodland around the photographer's home in rural Tuscany, published by Printed Matter, New York, in 2005 in an edition of 500.

In this unpaginated softcover, Herrmann turns the pastoral landscape near Riparbella into a stage for queer self-presentation, photographing himself amid the trees and grasses in one-man tableaux that shift between the idyllic and the explicit. The book carries a text by the Australian painter Peter Maloney and, in a characteristically playful credit, "selected underwear" by the Toronto artist and queer-scene organizer Will Munro. It launched a sustained series continued in Toscana 2 (2008, with texts by AA Bronson, Gregg Bordowitz, Christophe Chemin, and John Giorno), Toscana 3 (2009), and Toscana Dance (2010), all published by Printed Matter.

Herrmann (b. Munich, 1963) danced with the Vienna State Opera Ballet before studying at the University of Applied Arts Vienna, and has made the artist's book the primary carrier of a photographic practice centered on identity, the male body, and homosexual desire. President of the Vienna Secession from 1999 to 2006 and professor of art and photography at the Academy of Fine Arts Vienna, he has also published extensively with FOTOHOF edition, Salzburg, including 8x10, A-Z, and Mantua Mantua.