The historiography of Hungarian Photography has been pushed into the background among the arts for a long time. The last usable hsitory of Hungarian photography was published in 1958, since then only studies dealing with different parts of the photography appeared.
The author of the present volume, Mihály Simon, who is a historian teaching history of photography at the University of Beloit in the United States as well as a practising photorapher, and therefore has a view of European and Hungarian photography. He presents a history of Hungarian photography being very different from the ones before. The volume, besides taking into account the most significant photographers, schools, styles and periods, continuosly refers to the current social-historical context of photography. The most significant new feature of his work is that he places the genre of photography into a wider context through paralleling the oeuvres and works with other fields of fine arts as well as with the works of world photography of the same period.