In 1978, while on her annual summer holiday with her family in the town of Rabka in Poland’s southern highlands, Rydet began a series of photographs that came to be called the Sociological Record. Then sixty-seven years old, she dedicated the rest of her career to this body of work, ultimately producing more than twenty-seven thousand negatives. Knocking on doors in rural Poland, she would ask the inhabitants to sit at the center of a room surrounded by their belongings and stare directly into the camera lens. “They are to be static, as if objects themselves,” the artist described of her subjects.
2022
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Zofia Rydet
Polish, born Stanisławów, Austria-Hungary, 1911, died Gliwice, Poland, 1997 27 works onlineThat summer, while on her annual summer holiday with her family in the town of Rabka in the southern highlands of Poland, 67-year-old Rydet embarked on her magnum opus: a series of photographs that came to be called Sociological Record .
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