Baász almost never chose the actual political situation or oppression specifically as a theme. Even the work entitled File, which depicts the typical layout of the surveillance dossiers made by the Securitate (Departamentul Securității Statului, the secret police of Romania, between 1948 and 1989) to find and target dissidents. The dossier is old, stained, and dirty and the pages are pinned together with a safety pin, which is also one of the key signs of the artist, dominating The Wounds of the Earth series.

The Reformatory School in Aszód has undergone many changes since its foundation in 1884, and a lot has happened between its walls. The institution is still in operation today, having survived two world wars, the communist dictatorship, and even a tragic homicide. In 1973, Tamás Urbán took around 500 touching, shocking, and honest pictures about the lives of the residents of the reformatory school as his graduation project.

He was able to take photographs in the institution because he was working together with Youth Magazine (Ifjúsági Magazin), and he did not have face any particular challenges or have to deal with unusual complications while working on the project, though he visited the institution several times a week for two or three months. As Urbán sees it, this was because of his discrete style, especially when he did reports. He consciously avoided splurge, he brought only the most necessary equipment with him, and he did not force anything. As he recalled in 2015, “Suddenly I was in the community and everything came naturally.” He spent days among the residents, closely observing their everyday lives, including how they worked, played, and took drugs. Urbán maintained contact with a number of the residents of the institution even after he had finished the project. These letters, however, had to be smuggled out.

In 1975, Urbán’s first exhibition was held at the Reformatory School, and it featured the pictures he had taken there. The event was opened by Éva Keleti, one of Urbán’s teachers, but the plan to exhibit the pictures to a larger audience could not be realized: the authorities did not allow the photos to be taken from the institution because of their content. A representative of the ministry who was present for the opening ceremony made this decision clear. The pictures were impounded and the remained at the Reformatory School. While Éva Keleti and others tried to prevail on the authorities to change their decision – (even going as far as György Aczél in the process), they were not successful. Nevertheless, in 1978, Urbán brought this photo series to the first display of the Studio of Young Photographers. Despite the prohibitions, the photos brought him success, both from the audiences and in the profession. As Urbán recalls, because of this photo report, he was accepted into the Association of Hungarian Journalists. The photos taken at the Reformatory School are also the direct antecedents to his major topics of the 1980s: the photo series about prisoners and people on the margins of society, such as drug users.

The photo shows probably the first artistic mural in Poland, made by Christian Wabl in 1973, during the Fifth Biennial of Spatial Forms Cinema Laboratory (Kino Laboratorium) in Elbląg. The mural showing "a letter to the people" made of flowers' pictographs instead of letters of the alphabet was painted on the wall of the Mechanical Works Zamech company. Tomasz Sikorski made the photo during the Biennale in 1973.

Report "The status of counter-intelligence work of the State Security to unveil and suppress the subversive activities of the enemy among the artistic intelligentsia and measures for its improvement", Sofia, April 20, 1973.

The report presents the state security's vision of how "the enemy" tries to win over wavering members of the artistic intelligentsia (whose majority is said to support and promote the party line). It is reported that among the intelligentsia groups of friends are formed in so called ‘microstructures’ opposing the policies of the party. Typical examples of this are said to be the writers Hristo Ganev, Valeri Petrov, Marko Ganchev, Gotcho Gotchev and Blagoy Dimitrov. The report is a good example for the assessment of the political attitudes of the intelligentsia by the state in the early 1970s, and also of the way how such assessments were rhetorically framed.

Exhibition Szövegek / Texts, August 19–25, 1973, organized by Dóra Maurer and Gábor Tóth. Conception: Dóra Maurer

Szövegek / Texts was the first international exhibition of visual experimental poetry in Hungary including concrete texts, visual poetry, text-based conceptual artworks, and other poetry related experiments. The conception of the exhibition came from Dóra Maurer who, with the help of Gábor Tóth, has worked on an international collection of text based works for years. The exhibition at Balatonboglár was accompanied by concrete poetry actions, such as Hommage à Tristan Tzara by Dóra Maurer, or Fire/Ice by Tibor Gáyor.

The Private collection of Sándor Olasz, editor of Tiszatáj, a journal banned in the 1980s, about critical, nonconformist literature. The collection is owned by Sándor Olasz’s family: his widow and son.