The term indicates that not everything is considered equally worthy of being put in an image and thus framed and highlighted. Irene Dölling developed the term "image-worthy" in direct conjunction with one of her analyses of stereotypical ideas of masculinity and femininity in the GDR. The emergence of the term thus has a direct reference to gender relations in the visual worlds of the GDR. Dölling examined photos in widely circulated GDR magazine publications that show women and men in their everyday reality (Dölling, 1991, p. 7). Based on the thesis that there was no equality between the sexes in the GDR, especially with regard to the allocation of production and reproduction work, and that this fundamental separation was not eliminated (ibid., p. 197) until the end of the GDR, Dölling uses images to show that traditional gender relations remained largely unbroken despite women’s participation in the workforce (ibid., p. 8; see also Baader/Koch/Neumann, 2023 for further reference on illustrations in GDR textbooks and children's books).

Two fundamental image-theoretical assumptions form the backdrop for Dölling’s analyses, namely that images have a great power of fascination, and that social and political ideas and norms are revealed in images (Dölling, 1991, p. 8). In the context of her "Cultural History of Gender Relations in the GDR" („Kulturgeschichte der Geschlechterverhältnisse für die DDR”, ibid., p. 9), Dölling attributed great importance to images and investigated, among other things, which aspects of the lives of women and men are and are not included in the image, i.e. are not worthy of being depicted (ibid., p. 7). For Dölling, the question of image-worthiness has both a heuristic and a methodological dimension regarding the analysis of living and gender relations, which on the one hand sharpens the view of gender relations and on the other hand produces important results on the social positioning of women. The main results of this study can be illustrated by the character figure of the working mother (ibid., p. 197). Motherhood, for example, is figuratively staged through the symbiosis of women’s and children’s bodies (ibid., p. 201), which conveys the idea that women have a ‘different purpose’ than men (ibid.). At the same time, however, housework is figuratively pushed to the margins (ibid., p. 200) by the dominant representation of women’s professional activity, in that it does not take on a pictorial form (ibid., p. 211). Rather, the successful compatibility of career, family and motherhood because of socialist employment and family policy was portrayed, while the associated double burden on women was not or only very rarely visible (cf. ibid., p. 208ff.).