Heves megyei aprónyomtatványok 8/I

people who — though being much ahead of him in their photo—conception — meant supposedly nothing to him and whom his name was also tried to play off against.

It is a fact, that the "new" tendencies observable on our exhibition were already present in Hungary at the turn of the 60ies and 70ies but our public art life would not have been ready for their representative, comprehensive exhibition either then or a couple of years later — when I drew attention to their appearence in the 1972/3. number of the magazine "Fotóművészet". Thus, as it regards the second part of the Hatvan exhibition aside of the presentation of novelties, we had to shoulder a kind of retrospective character. Whatever is reflecting in this up-to-date material documenting the state of affairs in the middle of the 70ies, is a necessary expansion and individual exploration of the radically new principles the appearence of which were already sensed and applied by our most farsighted artists at the end of the 60ies. (Or they might be actually the ones who formulated them.)

What have these new princliples been? The following issues came into the light: the relationship of reality and artistic reality, the setting and expanding of the borders of art, the nature of the epistemological and social function of art To what a degree can the "picture" of reality be identified with reality? (This question is the source of the so-called "identificational" and "tautological" works.) Is art entitled to deal with subjects "strange to its genre" like e. g. time? (The representation of processes, the depiction of momentary events.) Can a "picture" intervene in reality itself? ("Project art" works, with a magic flavour.) Starting from the undoubtable social role of mass communication media: can art make use of these media? If so, what are these media in fact? How does art itself behave as a medium?

In the formulation of these questions photography came handy for artists. (Not only photography, but several other old or new media, from writing to television — naturally resulting in a mass of new problems by getting into an artistic context.) Its objectivity enabled

it for authentic documentation of actions conceived as fine art, or for the demonstration of observation of processes in time. The photography appearing on a fine art exhibition possessed enough news value to attract attention to its medium—characteristics. (Naturally, by this time its virtual objectivity had to be subjected to special investigation.) And lastly, the "everyday", easily available character of photography also favoured the tendency aimed at the democratization of art.

It is related to the latter effort that among those, who used photography for artistic purposes the earliest and the most self-evidently, two have never lead a traditional photographic practice: Miklós ERDÉLY hardly ever took a camera in his hand though even his early works are of an expressed medial character (the use of flash, which "extinguishes" the human face, or the action during which a photograph questioning itself is developed), while Tamás SZENTJÓBY besides his pictures created as action objects mainly worked with "found" and re-interpreted photos. On the other hand, László LAKNER con