The exhibition presents the Hungarian history of the last sixty-seventy years along two parallel lines. Apparently, this is Hungary but anyone, living in this region can recognize him/herself in the children smiling over the century, and similarly the event presented in the pictures could have happened to any of us as well.
We are showing faces of children one after the other. Most of them are unknown, the others? name are just as unimportant. They seem the same, still ... The first picture was taken in 1928,  the boy must be an old man or even have died. The model of the last picture was set in front of the camera last year, he knows nothing about this world. Still, there is one thing that joins them: all of their picture was taked by a special Hungarian photographic institution: the Album of Smile.
There was hardly anyone who was not photographed here, in a small studio, near Nyugati Railway Station.
In the past sixty years it has covered approximately 30 children portraits a day, 200 a week, 1000 a month, around 60.-70.000 up till now. These chilren have been smiling over the Horthy era, the great depression, the deportations, the second world war, the coalition times, the communists getting into the power, the revolution of 1956, the retaliations afterwards, the Goulash-commuism with Kádár, the change of regime and who knows what else. The essence of about 100.000 children photographs is the history of Hungary. The exhibition tells us about all this.
For more that seventy years similar pictures of smiling, naked or elegantly dressed  children clutching cheap toys have been taken and sold in a pre-war postcard form. The institution founded by József Grósz has survived everything and everyone and hopefully will continue taking these clumsy, nice, lovable and smile-provoking photographs of children in the future. Besides the photographs of the Album of Smile shots and photo-reports can be seen from the same years. It is not documentary exhibition, not a history lesson. We have already had enough of them. These pictures are only true and thought provoking marks from the period between 1928 and 1989.
The pictures belong to the collection of the Hungarian Museum of Photography