Máté Bartha spent 18 months living and working in military-style youth summer camps in rural Hungary. His series Kontakt, which won the Discovery award at this year’s Arles photography festival as well as the last year’s Capa Grand prize in Hungary, captures the rigorous discipline as well as the camaraderie of the camps, where children between the ages of 10 and 18 sleep under canvas and wake at dawn. Their long days are a dogged regime of hard work, army-style training, hiking and survival skills, including how to use replica guns that chillingly resemble the real thing.

“I went there with many preconceptions,” says Bartha, who describes himself as a pacifist, “but being there for so long made me realise I had very shallow knowledge about the military and warfare. I saw anything to do with weapons as necessarily aggressive and destructive but, for many people, learning about or even training in home defence is a natural part of growing up. It provided me a new context in which to look behind the eye-catching surface.”

The “eye-catching surface”, though, is what gives many of the images their visceral power. In one arresting portrait a prepubescent girl cradles a gun as she stares fiercely into his camera. In another, a gaggle of youngsters, hooded and dressed in ill-fitting army fatigues, cling to one another. In one ominous landscape, devoid of humans, a pile of realistic firearms sits on a table in the woods on the edge of a camp site. To liberal western eyes, these images suggest a kind of militaristic indoctrination.

In Hungary, in the wake of the election of prime minister Viktor Orbán, a rightwing populist, there has been an increase in the number of high-school military training programmes, which the government claims will make students more patriotic. The youth training camps that Bartha has photographed have been part of ordinary life in Hungary for decades. Their existence may be more to do with reinforcing national pride in a country that, as Bartha notes, “has been part of many different empires, has been invaded many times and has lost a number of wars”.

Their ideology is essentially conservative and patriotic. On the Honvédsuli (Home Defence School) website, the Hungarian NGO makes clear its commitment “to teach discipline, patriotism, and camaraderie to children between 10 and 18”, in a society that they believe is becoming “slothful and disconnected”. Bartha tells me that one of the leaders is a former French Foreign Legion soldier (the other is a “family-support expert”).

“They believe that today’s youth is losing its connection with some core values that enable them to function in society,” says Bartha. “And many of the parents say they’re unable to discipline their children. The organisers see it as a place where kids can learn to appreciate a home, clean clothes, warm food, nature, a community, as well as learning the value of hard work.”

He is keen to emphasise the positive, even transformative, aspects of the camp experience. “Most of the children who attend have never slept in a tent or lit a campfire. Some have never swum outdoors before. In the first days at camp, you see kids crying over not being able to use their mobile phones, but in the end they have this common experience of achieving something meaningful as well as their shared memories of hiking and sweating under the sun. They may even have some pretty harsh memories, like having to guard the campfire in the middle of the night, but, as I have witnessed many times, they go through a really positive transformation.”

While such character-building – usually accomplished without weapons training – is a feature of all youth summer camps, in Hungary, Bartha says, the emphasis is on building a sense of community, and the military training is seen as an essential part of creating that.

“Most of these kids are already into war games and movies. They want to see what it’s like in real life. Many of them end up not wanting to become soldiers after their experience. There are discussions about the hardships of war, the value of life and what particular soldiers were risking, or even losing, to protect a country or an idea. In good hands, such discussions can avoid idealising heroic death or glorifying war. To them, it’s about valuing what we have.”

Born in Budapest in 1987, Bartha was brought up “in a family of architects and doctors” and he initially studied architecture before switching to photography. Ambiguity, he says, is a “core element” of his approach. That is why he chose to use a mixture of landscape and posed portraits rather than straight documentary in the Kontakt series. The ambiguity is there in the image of the hooded youths – what is observed, what is a kind of heightened theatre for the camera? Likewise the image of the fierce-looking young girl cradling a gun – is she troubled or posing aggressively? In Kontakt, it is the more tender portraits of teenagers embracing or lost in reverie that seem most natural and the most revealing.

“Initially, I wanted to shoot a documentary film,” Bartha says of his hybrid approach, “but I soon realised that all the shouting and playing war games with weapons loses its exotic feeling after a while. It became mere role-play, though with some very strong visual symbols. The real happening was inside the kids, how they faced fear, love, excitement, friendship and struggle, maybe for the first time in their lives. I wanted in some way to convey that experience and to ask some other questions: what part of this is down to human nature, and what is not? To what extent are we disturbed by what we see, and what parts are we maybe even envious of?”

The organisers of the Home Defence School were remarkably open to the idea of having a stranger from the capital come into their midst with a camera. “It is very important for me to be ethically ‘clean’ with a project, to have my subjects completely understand my standpoint from the start,” explains Bartha. “I told them up front that the finished series might have an ambivalent reception, especially in Hungary, but they told me that they have nothing to hide. They had complete trust in me, which was surprising and also very moving. I didn’t feel like an outsider. I think that they saw in me a mirror in which to observe themselves.”

How, though, did he negotiate the more ethically tricky terrain of photographing children, some of whom may have a glamorised notion of guns and warfare, all of whom are engaged in a militaristic project that many observers will interpret as indoctrination?

“I couldn’t remain completely detached, but I didn’t want to get too involved either,” he says, with refreshing honesty. “It’s very hard to find that line where you’re able to show things that disturbed you at some point, while, at the same time, being able to show the other side – though without becoming some kind of a PR agent for the community. I thought the best approach would be to take the viewer by the hand, and lead them through the same process of discovery I underwent as I was trying to understand what I was seeing.”

Bartha has also made a short, impressionistic documentary film, Downstream, which traces the troubled life of a teenager called Vivien, who was abandoned by her mother as a child and finds solace and a sense of belonging in a youth military camp. On the evidence of the trailer on his website, it is a much more poetic, meditative exploration of the same theme through the dreams and discontents of an individual.

“I found Vivien while I was shooting Kontakt,” he says. “She comes from a very tough background, with a lot of uncertainty, but she is also very cool and has a strong personality. She had been drifting from one adoptive family to the other, but she wants to change everything, to have a decent life, a partner, a job. I immediately started shooting with her as well. The two projects helped each other.”

Both the film and the photographs are complex responses to a controversial subject. For me, it is the quiet, tenderly observed moments that most challenge our – and his – preconceptions about these militaristic training camps for the young and impressionable. It is the kids with guns, though, that command our attention. If you were to remove them, the series would have an altogether more innocent feel as if these teenagers were simply attending an adventure-driven summer camp in the woods.

The reality is that these youngsters are being trained to shoot and kill as well as hike and forage, and, at present, the backdrop to this nationalistic character-building is a country in which the “other” is constantly demonised as the enemy, where an ultra-nationalist prime minister has described refugees as “Muslim invaders”. Here, as always, context is all and it is the shadows that lurk beyond the frame that make Máté Bartha’s images so powerful and so ominous.

Máté Bartha’s Kontakt runs at Rencontres d’Arles until 22 September