Critical textZofia Rydet

Zofia Rydet (1911, Stanisławów – 1997, Gliwice) once said “I need to take photos immediately – it’s like an addiction, like vodka for an alcoholic”. Rydet fully embraced her passion for the camera at the age of forty. In 1978, she set herself an impossible task: to photograph the inside of every household of the Polish countryside. She worked on the remarkable set of pictures right up to her death, resulting in an inventory of 20,000 negatives titled Sociological Record (1978–97), capturing more than one hundred villages and towns. She focused mainly on people of the countryside, children, and mothers, photographing them with a wide-angle lens and usually with bright flash that also brought out the crude details of the interiors of their houses. Invested in how domestic objects such mirrors, stoves, TV sets and tapestries as well as architecture were arranged, and how individual, political, and religious convictions were expressed in domestic spaces, Rydet was convinced that photography had the mnemonic ability to preserve not only people’s existence but also their essence and core. In her photomontages titled World of Feelings and Imagination (1975–79), Rydet found collaging to be a liberating process, one in which she stitched together cut-out pieces from her own photographs to create mock-ups which she then re-photographed. Comprising nearly one hundred surrealist images with motifs such as gloves rising from damp soil, mannequin figures and parched tree branches, not to mention horizons shaped by female curves in post-apocalyptic landscapes, Rydet zoomed into what she called the ‘feelings and desires, loneliness and fear to which love is the only remedy, and the tragedy of evanescence’.