Fényképalbumok Rákosi Mátyás születésnapjára
Photograph Albums for Mátyás Rákosi’s Birthday

Visual Propaganda in the Hands of the Working People

Summary/Abstract: The paper examines the photographic albums presented to celebrate communist leader Mátyás Rákosi’s sixtieth birthday (1952). The photographs in the “Rákosi-albums,” now kept in public collections, reflect the methods and topics of communist visual propaganda; many albums even contain popular paper prints disseminated by the state-owned Magyar Fotó Company (Hungarian Photo). These recycled photographs, originally and primarily created to secure the loyalty of the “working people” for the regime and its aims, were used in the gift albums by the workers as a means of communication with the leader. In order to explore the complexity of the albums’ contexts, both the contents of the images and the materiality of the sources must be taken into consideration. The order and the grouping of the photographs, the captions, the texts and the graphic components were all important part of the communications in which the albums’ senders presented the life and the achievements of a given working community. Although the compilations convey the image of a virtual Hungary, the study also cites examples where the idealised self-representation does include accounts of problems or shortcomings. Finally, the paper presents the changes which the evaluation of these complex sources underwent during their life in public collections. In the years of their production and gifting, the albums were seen as evidence how the current political practice benefitted the country. Following the condemnation of the personality cult phenomenon in 1956, museum experts interpreted them as tangible evidence of a harmful and wrong method of governance. The author points out that the social life of the albums as objects, and the social life of the image contents of the album’s photographs went separate ways. Taking both materiality and image content into consideration equally, the paper is an attempt to examine the complex meanings of these sources.

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