That several of East Germany's best known photographers were never represented in Die Fotografie is the result of a political ban on their work. Artists who produced images too distant from the socialist definition of photography (Thomas Florscheutz, for example, who in 1987 won European Photography's First Prize for Young Photographers and exhibited in West Germany, France, and the USA, but was unpublished in East Germany and exhibited there only in private galleries) were prohibited from its pages, and thus forced to find refuge for their work in underground galleries and foreign journals. Others were omitted from Recollecting a Culture when it was apparent that Die Fotografie's editors had selected the weakest work of an otherwise powerful artist (Gundula Schulze, for example, whose controversial portraits and nudes drew thousands of visitors from throughout Germany to the tiny White Elephant Gallery in East Berlin in the mid 1980s, but who was represented in Die Fotografie by a series of academic landscapes).

The wholly unexpected publication of Peter Oehlmann's photo-installation "Selbstbefragung" in 1983 spoke eloquently for the many artists who were prohibited from Die Fotografie. The installation, composed of dozens of nude and angst-filled self-portraits of the artist, on the walls and floor of the gallery, plus a wall of images photographed from television and objects hanging from strings, had the appearance of a "private" or illegal exhibition. Its publication was unprecedented, and acknowledged the existence of a community of artists that had, until that moment, worked in utter obscurity outside the system of state support. Nothing that followed it was ever quite as shocking. Nevertheless, publication of Oehlmann's work appears to have opened the floodgates for the presentation of works by a new generation of young artists who flatly rejected socialist aesthetics, and focused instead on the formerly hidden details of East German life. Images of sexual ambiguity and forthright eroticism, punk culture, apathy in the workplace and despair at home, as well as photographs that mocked state prohibitions on photography, grew increasingly common in the late 1980s, and drew large audiences to the exhibitions in which they were presented. The last generation of East German photographers struggled uncompromisingly to reinvest the image-making process with truth-value. If their work proved unpublishable in East Germany, rather than allowing the state to reduce them to silence, as had many of their predecessors, they sent it elsewhere and suffered the consequences.