In 1978, Zofia Rydet launched into a colossal process: photographing the within of each family in Poland. The 67 year-old had already produced a significant physique of labor with Little Man – a examine on kids, printed as a guide in 1965 – whereas her collection of photomontages, The World of Feeling and Imagination, had been in growth since 1975. What turned Sociological Record would in the end take Rydet into the Nineties, culminating in additional than 20,000 photos, solely a fraction of which have been ever printed (by the collection’ finish her efforts have been solely targeted on ensuring there was a document, versus sharing it).
(Image credit score: From Sociological Record © Zofia Rydet, courtesy of the Zofia Rydet Foundation)
(Image credit score: From Sociological Record © Zofia Rydet, courtesy of the Zofia Rydet Foundation)
‘Not everyone could have had access to these people,’ says Clare Grafik, Head of Exhibitions at The Photographers’ Gallery in London, the place a considerable new exhibition of the work has simply opened (by means of 22 February 2026). ‘They were often in rural areas with a very local life. For her to gain their trust and access their inner most domestic environments, is a real testament to her personality.’ Rydet travelled by bus or relied on mates for lifts, turning up and knocking on doorways unannounced. ‘The actual photographing was quite quick,’ Grafik provides on a video name, ‘it was the conversations she would subsequently have with the homeowners, that profoundly affected the way she thought about life and work.’
(Image credit score: From Sociological Record © Zofia Rydet, courtesy of the Zofia Rydet Foundation)
A month earlier I had been invited to the Zofia Rydet Foundation, inside the house of its founders, Zofia AugustyNska-Martyniak and her mom Maria Sokol-AugustyNska (Rydet was AugustyNska-Martyniak’s nice grandfather’s sister, although she often refers back to the photographer as her nice grandmother). Sat within the household’s front room with Grafik and her co-curator, lecturer and cultural supervisor Karol Hordziej, the go to mirrored some model of Rydet’s personal circumstances, with speak filling a lot of our allotted time. At one level AugustyNska-Martyniak recollects casually how, when Rydet died, in Gliwice in 1997, many of the household have been considering inheriting her cameras; she and her mom as an alternative turned custodians of the archive, and it moved with them from a residence in Rabka, to the Kraków home the place we’re launched. The Foundation was established in 2011.
Hordziej , a college good friend of AugustyNska-Martyniak’s (he remembers, unconscious of their gravity on the time, first seeing Rydet’s photos on the partitions of her residence), has been working with the Foundation for plenty of years, initially serving to to digitalise the archive as a method to protect, have fun and prolong its operate. In London nevertheless, the main focus is on round 100 bodily prints Rydet made in her residence darkroom, in addition to books and private letters. A documentary, ‘Endlessly Distant Roads’ can also be on present; made by the Polish filmmaker Andrzej Różycki in 1989, in it, a younger AugustyNska-Martyniak may be seen strolling beside Rydet, carrying the photographer’s digital camera bag.
(Image credit score: From Sociological Record © Zofia Rydet, courtesy of the Zofia Rydet Foundation)
‘The Photographers’ Gallery is considering what occurs to archives, the way you take care of archives on-line, and the way they then get translated into bodily exhibitions,’ continues Grafik. ‘This project became quite important in terms of thinking about that, because obviously the digitalisation of much of the Sociological Record was the way that that work suddenly became disseminated beyond the boundaries of this sort of niche field, but we’re only a tiny a part of it. Ultimately the prints inform you one thing totally different about what her intention was for the work, versus scans from negatives.’
‘The project was such an ambitious undertaking, particularly for a photographer in the autumn of her career, to suddenly decide that’s what she wanted to do,’ she notes. ‘It brings up all sorts of interesting issues to do with photography, archives, identity; there’s many layers to it.’ Rydet predominantly labored in black and white, capturing with a large angle lens and flash, and the exhibition is essentially comprised of the busy home areas of the undertaking’s ‘People in Interiors’ sub-series; lace curtains, non secular ephemera, floral tablecloths and posters of pop stars all characteristic. Elsewhere are works from ‘Women on Doorsteps’, ‘Windows’ and ‘Presence’, the latter highlighting the numerous photos of Pope John Paul II Rydet noticed on her travels, (notably elected the identical 12 months the Sociological Record commenced, the previous Archbishop of Kraków had been the primary non-Italian pope in over 400 years).
(Image credit score: From Sociological Record © Zofia Rydet, courtesy of the Zofia Rydet Foundation)
‘She was very free,’ presents Hordziej, who has labored on earlier Zofia Rydet exhibitions throughout Poland and likewise in Paris. ‘She never married, never had her own family. Maria from the Foundation told me that her male colleagues [as well as joining photo clubs, she became a member of the Union of Polish Art Photographers in 1965] joked that they were kind of jealous, that she could save all her money for traveling and focus on photography. But she also wanted to talk with her photographs, to ordinary people. She really focused on the message – it’s not the way it’s executed however what’s it about.’ Attuned to the undertaking’s future significance, throughout her lifetime Rydet made a degree of getting into competitions and gifting her work, oftentimes sending it out internationally; a few of these respective labels and related ephemera nonetheless exist in a folder on the Foundation.
Five many years on, in opposition to a backdrop of digital camera telephones and social media, actuality TV and a recent curiosity in what different folks’s houses appear like (these earlier than us and at present round us), the exhibition brings Rydet’s work into a brand new context that speaks to her personal curiosity, and her need to share broadly what she noticed. ‘She was really photographing people – who wouldn’t have been photographed much in their lives, maybe never inside their houses – in their kind of essence, in these interiors that had been put together very organically and often practically,’ shares Grafik. ‘Versus today, where things are photographed all the time. They are so rich as images, each one is a little universe.’
Zofia Rydet: Sociological Record is a part of the UK/Poland Season 2025, produced with The Photographers’ Gallery in partnership with the Adam Mickiewicz Institute and the Zofia Rydet Foundation. It is on view at The Photographers’ Gallery till 22 February 2026