When the fashion industry began to withdraw from Berlin, Rico Puhlmann also left the city. Until that point, he had been a well-known and highly sought-after fashion photographer alongside F.C. Gundlach, Hubs Flöter, and Charlotte March. His departure to New York in 1970 was risky. Could he compete against established photographers like Richard Avedon or Irving Penn? The gamble paid off. By August of that same year, he had his first publication in Glamour magazine, and two years later, his first cover photo in the glossy magazine Harper's Bazaar, for which he regularly created major photo spreads with supermodels like Cindy Crawford and Naomi Campbell until 1992.
He had once been a star before and then stepped away from it all. This is where his major retrospective "Rico Puhlmann: Fashion Photography 50s-90s" at the Museum of Photography begins. A child star of UFA studios, the Berlin native first stood in front of the camera in 1940 at age six and appeared in around 15 films until 1954. There would have been more films had he not enrolled in fashion graphics at the University of Fine Arts in 1951. But film never completely let him go. After switching from pencil to camera, his sense of lighting and sets acquired in film studios clearly came to bear in his fashion productions.
Starting in the 1970s, he dedicated himself to filmmaking. From 1973 onward, he became a filmmaker himself and produced segments from New York for the fashion journal produced by SFB, still fascinated by the city and its streetscape. As seen in the exhibition, he mixed staged scenes in which professional models presented New York labels like Ralph Lauren, Calvin Klein, or Oscar de la Renta with documentary street-style shots, for example of Puerto Ricans and Black people who met on weekends at Bethesda Fountain in Central Park.
The segments, broadcast twice a year on Sunday afternoons on the first program and set to current chart hits by Puhlmann, significantly contributed to making American fashion popular in Germany. By closely observing street style trends like platform shoes, knee socks, or huge gold hoops, he provided a direct, unfiltered view of youth culture that the fashion press of the time didn't know. He was also aware of the fashion influence of New Hollywood with films like Chinatown, The Sting, or The Great Gatsby, especially on young men.
As a true fashion aficionado and part of pop and subculture himself, he could design the image of a new, modern man from 1980 onward through his work at GQ (Gentlemen's Quarterly) alongside Bruce Weber, a man who had naturally long been walking the streets of international metropolises. Thanks to his athletically toned body, the new man could wear clothes casually. Soft, flowing fabrics were no longer taboo. Yes, he was allowed to make himself comfortable, as Puhlmann's 1982 photograph of two male models literally lounging in bed for GQ shows.
Unlike Helmut Newton or Guy Bourdin, Rico Puhlmann was never about breaking taboos. Rather, he acted in his photo shoots first as a connoisseur of fashion and clothing craftsmanship and then as a professional in the art of performance. Puhlmann's photographs are very lively. This is also because he liked to work outdoors and showed fashion in the context of everyday life, urbanity, leisure, and travel. How this specific style of his developed can be well traced through the early fashion drawings, Polaroids and films, magazine covers and major photo spreads, as well as appointment calendars.
In the carefully and knowledgeably curated exhibition, not only photography and fashion history but also press and cultural history come into play. And because it's currently an anniversary: Typical of Puhlmann's idea of fashion presentation is the model he photographed in 1995 in front of the Reichstag wrapped by Christo and Jeanne-Claude. The photograph is a cheerful fashion image - far removed from the statuesque glamour of fashion photography with which photographers like Steven Meisel or Mario Testino, in collaboration with stylists, makeup artists, and art directors, claimed interpretive hegemony over fashion at that time.
Rico Puhlmann didn't want to go along with that and oriented himself back toward Europe. The wrapped Reichstag appeared in the Italian fashion magazine Amica. For another assignment, he boarded TWA Flight 800 to Paris on July 17, 1996, and died in the crash of the aircraft just off Manhattan.
The retrospective "Rico Puhlmann: Fashion Photography 50s-90s" runs until February 15, 2026, at the Museum of Photography Berlin. A catalog published by Kettler is available for 39 euros and contains 256 pages. The thoughtfully curated exhibition demonstrates how Puhlmann understood how to photographically stage fashion for glossy magazines, mixing his film studio experience with street photography sensibilities to create a unique vision that bridged European sophistication with American energy.
