Die Fotografie was read internationally, in communist as well as capitalist nations. Moreover, although it focused on work that underwrote its aesthetic agenda, Die Fotografie regularly presented images by historical and contemporary photographers from throughout the world. The photographs presented in Recollecting a Culture, however, are limited to artists from East and West Germany, the USSR and its European satellites, China, and communist Southeast Asia. My hope was that by narrowing its scope, Recollecting a Culture would be made to illustrate that, within the context of a divided nation and an evolving socialist aesthetic, East German photography grew from a strain of Soviet socialist realism to a distinct critical practice, and that Die Fotografie played a crucial, if not always positive, role in that development.

To American eyes, the methods and subjects of East German photography may appear formulaic and cliched. Writing on behalf of the ZKF, in 1960 Gerhard Henniger listed the themes most worthy of pursuit by East German photographers as "[one's] own practice within production, his life in the brigade, within the family, his holidays, his recreation, his sports [...] socialist naming and marriages, brigade evenings and cooperative meetings." (DF-8/60, p. 292) Yet what we regard as banalities, images of the ordinary, are captured here with complete conviction. In fact, what distinguishes so much of the work presented in Die Fotografie is its simultaneous rejection of style and embrace of issues, such as health, work, youth and age, and leisure, all pictured though the lens of cultural politics. While acknowledging the humanism of The Family of Man and the work of the Magnum cooperative, the theorists of socialist aesthetics rejected the decisive moment as a mere formalist novelty. The stylistic elements of "critical realism," as such favored Western photography was called, could not disguise its basis in class values. "Despite all critique of bourgeois society, the bourgeois class point of view is not abandoned," Dr. F. Herneck wrote in 1960. (DF 8/60, p. 308) Socialist realism, by contrast, with its roots in the workers struggle and its ideals in the collective vision, represented a higher artistic achievement.