Zofia Rydet was ambivalent about the name of her most famous project. A Sisyphean task if ever there was one, Sociological Record was Rydet’s attempt to photograph inside every home in her native Poland. But Rydet, who started the mammoth project in 1978 when she was 67 years old, was never sure the name appropriately matched her intentions. (“Sociological Record” was coined by her friend, the critic and historian Urszula Czartoryska.) She felt the term sounded too academic for what she was trying to achieve; for Rydet, documentary photography was perhaps more art than science. Nevertheless, the more than 20,000 images she took before her death in 1997 offer a sweeping survey of Polish domestic life in the second half of the twentieth century. The project sought to preserve traditional folk culture in a country that was rapidly modernizing.
Rydet started the project late in her life, but then again she didn’t take photography seriously until she was 40, when she joined the Gliwice Photographic Society. By the time she started Sociological Record, Rydet’s work had already been published and exhibited in Poland. Her earlier photographs were surreal and dreamlike, in stark contrast to the photorealism of Sociological Record—the body of work that would define her. Exhibiting Sociological Record is a gargantuan challenge in and of itself. How many images need to be displayed to do justice to the scale of the project? A new show at London’s Photographers’ Gallery has stepped up to the task. The exhibition, which is also called “Sociological Record,” was curated by Clare Grafik and Karol Hordziej and forms part of U.K./Poland Season 2025 cultural program.
The premise of Sociological Record is both devilishly simple and impossibly laborious: a photograph inside every home in Poland. Its success would rest on the personality of the photographer. Rydet’s “method” was simply to knock on strangers’ doors and ask to take their picture inside. Not everybody would be able to charm their way inside so many homes, but Rydet was clearly as affable as she was ambitious. She had the gift of gab as well as of the lens.
Scan your eyes across the wall of images in the London display and repeated motifs stand out: pans hanging from ceilings, plates proudly displayed in cabinets, religious iconography affixed to walls (crosses, paintings of Jesus, photographs of Pope John Paul Ii). But there are idiosyncrasies in each image, touches of personality that remind us we are looking at people’s private spaces: a woman in her kitchen, a pile of dirty potatoes lying at her feet, a sullen teenager next to her posters of David Bowie and Sting. Each of the sitters stares unsmilingly (Rydet’s direction) into the camera. Her wide-angle lens and powerful flash meant that she could capture the dark interiors of people’s rural homes. Rydet once said she wanted to photograph the old and ugly to turn them into saints, but the flash rendered many of the faces ghostlike. They stare back at us like deer in headlights. The longer you look at the images, the more psychological, rather than sociological, they feel.
There were several subprojects within Sociological Record. One, Women on Doorsteps, is a series of portraits of women standing at the entrances of their homes. Another, Presence, shows the recurring portraits of Pope John Paul II, the popular pontiff who represented a moral authority against the Communist regime. In another subseries, Fieldwork, Rydet photographed her bus journeys, capturing herself in the reflection of the driver’s mirror. Amazingly, when Rydet set off to photograph every house in Poland, she took the bus.
Looking at the images now, we can glean insights into the everyday realities of Rydet’s Poland: the resistance of religion in a Communist state, the endurance of traditional folk culture in a country that was developing, the influence of Western tastes in the Soviet Bloc. Even if it wasn’t her main objective, Rydet’s series is a testament to individuality and memory in an oppressive regime. A nation is a difficult thing to define. Perhaps the best way to understand one is by its people and their private spaces.
Are the pictures in Sociological Record more art than documentary? Rydet had no qualms about rearranging the scenery to make the image look more visually interesting—a lamp moved here, a picture frame there. Where does the line between art and documentary sit? It would have been good if the London exhibition probed this question. Instead, we’re left largely to decipher the images ourselves.
There are roughly 100 prints on display, a small number compared to the thousands Rydet shot. One wishes there were more, to be swept away by a wall of faces from the past. The show can’t help but feel modest in comparison to the scale of the original project. Most of Rydet’s 20,000 negatives were never printed, so the curators decided to focus on the vintage prints made in Rydet’s lifetime. Traveling so often, with rolls and rolls of film accumulating, Rydet had little time to spend in the darkroom.
Where did this compulsion to record come from? Again, the London exhibition doesn’t question Rydet’s obsessiveness in any depth. Rydet asked herself this question in 1988. “I have so many pictures,” she said, “but I sometimes wonder: Is there any sense to it all? Why do I do it? Nobody wants them. It’s all so interesting, and I can’t exhibit it anywhere.” But, she went on, “every summer, like a dog returns to his kennel, I return to this.” What compelled her to return year after year? Rydet’s Poland saw war, occupation, and repressive Communist rule during her life. In turbulent times, tradition takes on somber significance. So too does the act of photographing. Photography, Rydet believed, could be a bulwark against change, even death itself. “Time is relentless,” Rydet once said, “and everything changes. Not only do people die, but with them their homes. Not only people vanish, but also everything that surrounds them. Only photography can stop time. Only photography has the power to overcome the specter of death, and that is my unending struggle with death and transience.”
“Zofia Rydet: Sociological Record” is on at The Photographers’ Gallery until February 22, 2026. It is produced by The Photographers’ Gallery in partnership with the Adam Mickiewicz Institute (co-financed by the Ministry of Culture and National Heritage), Poland and the Zofia Rydet Foundation.
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