ADVERTISING PHOTOGRAPHS (Hungary, 1962-1970)

All Hungarians know what füles means – literally ‘somebody with big ears’ or ‘to give somebody a smack up alongside the head’. And everybody knows that this is the sobriquet of the photographer József Tóth, whose advertisements embellished many Hungarian posters and magazines in the 1960s and ’70s. These involved Western style advertising commissioned by the state. They exhorted people to buy brand-name products which were however at the most only produced for the export market. In Hungary itself they referred to a non-existent market, since a choice among different brands was not possible there. Internally the idea was to work up public interest in a particular type of product. For instance, ads for Golden Smart super-long cigarettes were intended to whet an appetite for their no-filter proletarian substitute. The optimism exuded by the photos was also supposed to make people forget about the absence of the Western products which were so much better than what was available.