BERLIN.- In close proximity to the major retrospective "Rico Puhlmann. Fashion Photography 50s–90s" at the Museum of Photography, sixteen photography students from the Lette Verein Berlin are presenting new photographic and filmic works that engage with the fashion photographer's work in diverse ways.

While Puhlmann shaped fashion photography for over four decades and developed a distinctive visual language characterized by elegance, clarity, and staging, the participating artists take up key elements of his oeuvre and reinterpret them in light of contemporary issues.

Presence and posture are central to Puhlmann's photographs: His iconic fashion images are often characterized by the clearly defined figure within the urban space, condensing physicality, pose, and clothing into sculptural forms. This interplay of fashion, body, space, and gaze forms the starting point for many of the young photographers' works.

At the same time, the exhibition opens up new interpretations: How can Puhlmann's understanding of style, identity, and photography be read today, in a time when diversity, visibility, and representation are being renegotiated?

Puhlmann's Fashion Images Questioned and Reinterpreted

In their engagement with Puhlmann's work, the students' fashion shoots address both aesthetic and social aspects, formulating independent contemporary responses. Some pieces build upon his elegant, serene visual language and transpose it into contemporary urban spaces, natural light, and a reduced visual vocabulary. Others explore how bodies, clothing, and architectural backgrounds transform into dialogical spaces where pose and presence can be reinterpreted.

But the zeitgeist and social norms of the 1950s to 1990s, conveyed through Puhlmann's fashion images, were also examined. Themes such as visibility, self-assertion, queer realities, the subversion of normative beauty and body images, and dealing with age and diversity were central to her work. Her current projects emphasize diversity, directness, and a conscious openness to different bodies, identities, and lifestyles, thus creating new perspectives on a genre steeped in tradition.

The resulting fashion photographs combine vintage pieces with contemporary fashion or showcase designs by young designers. Here, modern silhouettes meet postmodern ones, translucent fabrics meet robust leather, and vibrant colors meet classic black and white. The boundaries between documentation and staging, between real urban space and stylized pictorial space, are deliberately kept open. Puhlmann's cinematic approach further explores her interest in movement and physicality, as well as the interplay between control and situational openness, translating it into the dynamics of today's urban landscape.

This creates a multifaceted panorama that not only reflects Puhlmann's visual world but also questions how fashion photography can function today: as a space for representation, as an aesthetic practice, as a social and political statement? The exhibition invites visitors to relate contemporary aesthetics to a historical work and to discover how attitude, body, and fashion are re-enacted, shifted, and negotiated across generations.

Curatorial Team: The exhibition is curated by Katja Böhlau and Ina Schoof.