The title of my book is “Fine, thanks,” which is obviously an answer. An answer to the question: “How are you feeling, Hungary?” After the transition of 1990 and during the short-lived liberal-democratic intermezzo, the corresponding laws were once again made more austere as a consequence of which spontaneous street photography has become practically impossible once again. So the opportunities for someone who would like to answer the above question in terms of pictures are highly limited. It still remains legal to take pictures of faces at public events. Public events are typically organized so as to make it possible for a group of people to demonstrate their tradition and rituals to a wider audience. The hidden obscene aspect of such events is the contradiction between the organizer’s intentions and the audience’s spontaneous reaction to it. The organizers always want to impose an official narrative on the audience but the latter tends to resist and in this discrepancy between their respective interpretations reality comes to the surface. The audience resists the official story and finally we may learn something completely different about the nature of the event than the organizer wanted us to see.
