How did image control function in socialism since the 1960s? The control practices of state socialist dictatorships cannot be adequately captured by the term censorship. Rather, it was a detailed yet highly flexible system of checks and balances that determined the pathways of photographs in the People's Republic of Hungary under party leader János Kádár. The author Eszter Kiss employs image- and actor-centered approaches to explore the possibilities and limitations of press photography, protocol photography, and social documentary images in socialism. In doing so, she encounters a web of ideological guidelines, a specific institutional framework created in the 1950s and 1960s, and diverse fields of action on the part of the actors. The study also consistently considers the image policies of other Eastern Bloc countries.