Backlight, folkloristic themes, pearly bouquet-optimism, lustrous prints, heaps of awards, the brightest period of Hungarian photography. It could be summerized in these few words. If it is so, why should an exhibition and a book devoted to it?
Why? Because it has proposed plenty of questions left half or completely unanswered. We know so little about it that we cannot even ask adequate questions enlightening the essence of a subject that we, Hungarian photographers are so deeply interested in. Questions like the followings:
Was it really the golden age of Hungarian photography? Or on the contrary, did it rather prove our extreme provincialism?
Was the contradiction between the two determining style of the age: between socio-photo and „Hungarian style” photo real or there may be some secret passages connecting them? From where and what did it adopt, and what is original in it? How far did it depend on politics, did it have anything to share with literature or other fields of art?
Who sent photographs and where were these pictures sent, what awards did they receive and what values did these awards have?
Do foreigners think the same of it as we do? What was the prevailing style in photography at that time? Has anybody beyond our borders heard of this style, are the photographers from different parts of the world interested in or not?
If they are, why? If they are not, why not?
And of course, yes. Is it Hungarian or „Hungarian style”? In Hungarian photography it was a question  very similar to the problem of homo usion vs homo iusion.
How and why were the forms, technique and approach of „Hungarian style” preserved from a rather right-winged, conservative political system to a soviet-type socialism?
And the question before the last: how can „Hungarian style” still give an opportunity for two photographers or experts in photography to quarrel?  How could it become and how can it be still the reason of political debates?
Has it any useful message that can be passed on to the photographers of our time or shall we put all this under glass and show them as old sportmen display the cups of their earlier success?
All this might illustrate well that this relatively short time is really worth dealing with as it is bearing the stamps of such representatives of Hungarian photographic art as  Rudolf Balogh, Ernő Vadas, Kálmán Szöllösy, István Kerny, Jenő Dulovits, Frigyes Haller, Angelo, György Haranghy, Rudolf Járai and many more.
The exhibition of the Hungarian Museum of Photography and the book to be published in the near future attempt to cast a kind of account of the 30-35 year period from the 1920s on through the masterpieces of the most significant photogrphers of this style. We are raising questions and attempt to give answers as well, and leave the rest to the readers and the visitors.