Social photography is the photographic document of social defencelessness, marginalized lives, and poverty. The first ever comprehensive work on the history of Hungarian social photography is appearing now. The book presents the earliest examples of Hungarian social photography –they are characterized by motives of philantrophy as much as by astonishment– then the life-works inspired by the social democratical and communist ideology. A peculiarly Hungarian phenomenon is that in the thirties there is a photography depicting the problems of the peasants. The volume depicts the Hungarian social photography in an international context, revealing the similarities and differences between the foreign and Hungarian phenomena.