Celebrating the Earth Day with Zofia Rydet's archive... The artists's monumental cycle Sociological Record was created in the years 1978 - 1997, Rydet began working on the cycle when she was already 67 years old. The idea came to her during an accidental visit in a car manufacturing plant in Jelcz. She was fascinated by the view of identical small working spaces that the employees decorated with cut-outs from newspapers, photographs of their families, religious pictures, erotic posters, landscapes, etc. Convinced that objects and images gathered in private spaces defined people and “revealed their psychology”, Rydet decided to pursue the mission of documenting the interiors of Polish houses. Sociological Record comprises nearly 30 thousand negatives made in more than 100 Polish villages. The artist strived to remain faithful to the method she adopted: the inhabitants of each house always look straight into the camera, they are portrayed with a wide-angle lens, with flash, against a wall. Nevertheless, the archive include hundreds of bizzare photographs which don't follow the strict rules of the project, like the ones depicted here.
More images from this vast repository of images might be browsed here. The archive will be shown at the Museum of Modern Art in Warsaw this Septmeber.
