The photography of everyday life, showing the gradual collapse of personal, social, and political stability in East Germany, is the true subject of this book and exhibition. Nowhere is this collapse more evident than in the ever-changing editorial mandates, the diatribes against bourgeois photography, the infrequent bold excursions into uncharted ground, and the progressively critical images presented in Die Fotografie. And nowhere is the failure of its socialist aesthetic more evident than in Die Fotografie's editorial refusal to acknowledge the fall of East Germany in 1989. Images of the dismantling of the Berlin Wall and the demonstrations that preceded it do not appear in the periodical until 1990, a full year or more after they occurred. In its failure to recognize this most spectacular event through the photography of everyday life, Die Fotografie lost its opportunity to stay relevant to East Germans living and working in a fundamentally altered world. The final issue of Die Fotografie was printed in March 1991.

A small sampling of articles, most written during the 1960s, is presented here more or less in their original format, as seen in the pages of Die Fotografie. All of these articles were written by representatives of the ZKF, and all were selected for the clarity of the imperatives they describe. However, it should be noted that in addition to such politically oriented texts Die Fotografie regularly published one-person portfolios, group portfolios (frequently by worker's brigades, but more often than not describing a particular theme or issue), instructional articles on scientific and "leisure" photography (animals, nature, travel, etc.), articles by curators, letters to the editor (including a popular forum for readers to respond to images), and much more.