Hungary never was a big colonial empire. For large layers of the Hungarian population remote countries were inaccessible and direct experience was limited to a few individual cases. In this article the author studies the role of photography in the discovery of exotic worlds by the Hungarians from the second half of the 19th century to the first decade of the 20th century. She analyses the photographer’s various behaviours and reflexions, and first of all the picture reception by the spectator. Through the prism of visual anthropology she depicts two forms of picture exploitation : the spectator makes his own conception of the exotic world by refering either to his previous knowledge or to the information delivered by the picture.