At the turn of the 19th and 20th century two contrasting processes took place in paralell in Hungary, just as in other countries. The professional studio photography declined, and at the same time amateur photography started to prosper. It was the time of art photography coming to life. In Hungary between the turn of the century and the 1920s the so called pictorialism was authoritative. The processes at that time led to the modern Hungarian art photography, which strengthened by the 1920s and formed its own means of expression in different genres. This was the starting point of almost everything that could serve as a ground for the autonomous photography independent from fine arts. Whether counsciously or not Kertész, Brassaï, Moholy-Nagy or Olga Máté, József Pécsi, Aladár Székely and Rudolf Balogh learnt from this: accepted or refused the ruling theories of aesthetics and art history.
The volume published in Hungarian–English covers this quarter of a century from the beginnings of the 1900s. The first pictures represent the rigid world of the studios, against which the pictorialist art photography came into being, the last ones represent the photography relying only on the power of vision without manipulation. These pictures are interesting in themselves but we put a special emphasis when selected the material on presenting the whole period, the directions, tendencies of changes.