The book by Rydet and Hennelowa might be the sole ambitious attempt at addressing the significance of the pope in the social, political, and religious life of the 1980s in Poland. It is most of all an exceptional and artistically mature reflection on the inflation of Karol Wojtyła's effigies and the virtually obsessive presence of images of the pope in the everyday living space of the citizens of the late Polish People's Republic. The titular presence of the pope in Polish homes may be easily explained as a play on the official propaganda that tried to marginalise his importance and visibility, as well as the institution he represented – the Church. In this way, Rydet's photographs become incidentally concerned with iconophilia. The photographer is interested in the craving for a holy image that describes the national identity, as well as in the social function and iconic potential of devotional souvenirs – the by-product of the media-hyped launch of Wojtyła's pontificate. Rydet paints a nuanced image of the Polish religiosity: on one hand, filled with devotional piety, and on the other, somewhat mechanical, as if it was replicating the official cult of the portraits of party dignitaries within the private sphere.
Apart from the Zapis socjologiczny's typical shots of house interiors with their owners pictured in the centre of the frames, the book also includes a number of less orthodox photographs (usually quite heavily cropped for the publication), documenting details of furnishings and home-ware. Rydet's black and white photographs seem to have come from a distant time; they also appear to be distant due to their specific ethnographic and removed gaze. A certain historicity of this material is also a result of the actual civilizational changes that occurred over the past thirty years. To some extent, Obecność also presents the fiasco of the Polish People's Republic's project of modernisation – interiors inhabited by representatives of various social classes differ drastically (from huts to petit bourgeois family apartments) and are connected exclusively by the images of the Polish pope – a symbol of a collective civil resistance to the social model imposed by the authorities.
publisher: Calvarianum Publishing House, Kalwaria Zebrzydowska
year of publication: 1988
Original text: polishphotobook.tumblr.com, transl. Ania Micińska, August 2015