One of Berlin’s most prestigious stops in the history of photography, the Museum für Fotografie, is currently hosting an exciting project that brings together the past and future of fashion. Open to visitors from 16 January to 15 February 2026, “Rico Reframed” reinterprets the fifty-year legacy of legendary fashion photographer Rico Puhlmann through the contemporary gaze of 15 talented students from Lette Verein Berlin. Accompanying the museum’s major Rico Puhlmann retrospective, this special selection once again proves that fashion is not merely the presentation of clothing, but also a space of social representation.
Puhlmann’s elegance, clarity, and sculptural understanding of the figure integrated with the city—from the 1950s to the 1990s—serves as a springboard for these young artists. The flawless choreography of body, pose, and space in Puhlmann’s photographs is now interwoven by today’s emerging photographers with current issues of diversity, visibility, and representation. The exhibition boldly asks: “How can Puhlmann’s understanding of style and identity be read in an era when normative ideals of beauty are being dismantled and queer realities are being centred?”
The students’ works bring together aesthetic and social layers, confronting Puhlmann’s calm and aristocratic visual language with the raw and direct reality of the present. While some carry Puhlmann’s use of natural light and minimal compositions into today’s urban spaces, others centre themes such as age, body diversity, and gender identity, shaking established norms. In these new perspectives—where transparent fabrics meet hard leather and vivid colours clash with classic black-and-white—the boundaries of a traditional genre are pushed, transforming fashion into a political statement.
The cinematic works in the exhibition continue Puhlmann’s interest in movement and physicality through the dynamism of the digital age. By deliberately leaving the boundary between documentation and choreography open, this panorama opens a polyphonic discussion about the possible functions of fashion photography today. “Rico Reframed” builds an intergenerational bridge, inviting all art lovers who wish to explore how poses, bodies, and fashion have evolved over time to join this richly layered dialogue.
