The worker photography movement famously began in 1926 when the Arbeiter Illustrierte Zeitung (AIZ) announced a competition to solicit the best amateur photographs of worker life and political activism. Among other things, the magazine hoped that pictures of this sort, contributed by the AIZ’s own readers, would populate the periodical’s pages and eliminate a reliance on commercial photo agencies, which scarcely depicted the working man and woman’s life. Yet despite this aspiration and the movement’s eventual success, worker photographs appeared only sporadically in the magazine’s pages. Why was this the case? The article suggests that the AIZ’s posture as virulent critique of the “bourgeois press” left it fundamentally incapable of absorbing photographs that it sought to praise rather than attack. Moreover, as the article argues, most pictures from the movement were far too sober for this activist charge.