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.
Gallery label from 2022
