The People in Their Rooms: Zofia Rydet’s ‘Sociological Record’

from_sociological_record_c_zofia_rydet_courtesy_of_the_zofia_rydet_foundation7.jpg, default, ‘Sociological Record 1978–1990’ by Zofia Rydet, photo: © Zofia Augustyńska-Martyniak / Zofia Rydet Foundation

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Zofia Rydet’s most famous photographic cycle is not so much a journey through the private landscapes of the late Polish People’s Republic as it is an image of a person captured by surprise in their own home, looking straight into the lens.

Zofia Rydet (1911–1997), a self-taught Polish photographer, began work on her Sociological Record (Zapis socjologiczny), now considered a classic work of Polish documentary photography, at the age of 67. Over 12 years starting in 1978, she visited 20 of the then 49 voivodeships of Poland. Most often she stayed in the villages of Podhale (Highlands) and Upper Silesia, but she also visited Podkarpacie (Subcarpathia), regions around Suwałki and Kielce and less frequently cities such as Kraków or Gdańsk. She photographed buildings, streets, people on the doorsteps of their homes but above all their interiors. The trademark of her photographs was a fairly simple compositional choice: a person sitting upright, not smiling, against the background of a representative wall of a house – walls that could oppress even a native viewer with their details.

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‘Sociological Record 1978–1990’ by Zofia Rydet, photo: © Zofia Augustyńska-Martyniak / Zofia Rydet Foundation

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So what would visitors to The Photographers’ Gallery think about seeing such an image on 10 October, when the gallery will open an exhibition of selected works from the Sociological Record? How to explain to them the images of Pope John Paul II, Our Lady of Częstochowa and wedding pictures (monidła) hanging side by side above the bed? The strange trousers lying next to a man in a baseball shirt and a hat on his head that artificial intelligence suggests labelling as a ‘cowboy hat’? In fact, I heard this interpretation from one person at The Photographers' Gallery while preparing the review of the exhibition later on.

The task of explaining these contexts has been taken on by Clare Grafik and Karol Hordziej, curators of the first major exhibition of the Sociological Record in the United Kingdom (open until 22 February 2026), organised with the support of the Zofia Rydet Foundation and the Adam Mickiewicz Institute as part of the UK/Poland Season 2025. In addition to examples of the most important sub-cycles that make up the Sociological Record (Ludzie we wnętrzach [People in Interiors], Kobiety na progach [Women on Doorsteps], Obecność [Presence]), it will also feature publications and materials from Zofia Rydet’s archive. It appears to have been an appropriate decision to also include photographs by Anna Beata Bohdziewicz, showing Rydet at work, and a short documentary film by Andrzej Różycki, Nieskończoność dalekich dróg. Podsłuchana i podpatrzona Zofia Rydet (Endlessly Distant Roads: Zofia Rydet Overheard and Observed, 1989), one of the few sources in which the author of the Record reveals her attitude towards her own artwork.

Psychological method

The film shows, for example, how she managed to gain the favour of the hosts she visited. She would knock on the door, shake hands, glance around the interior and...

I immediately say, ‘How nice it is here!’ Yes. Everyone likes to be told that they are nice, or that something is nice. I say, ‘I’ll take a photo of you right here’. ‘No, no, I’m not dressed…’ ‘It doesn’t matter… it doesn’t matter! It’s okay that you’re not dressed, it’s so pretty, really beautiful, where did you make this?’ etc. – I guess. And she doesn’t even realise that she’s not wearing shoes, she’s not dressed nicely – and she sits down.

After a few such sentences, a person falls into the most basic dependency – on a compliment that must be repaid. The dependency is all the stronger considering that they are facing a petite, elderly woman, stubborn and tired. She came here by bus, lugging her camera, specially to see us, in the middle of a hot summer. How could you turn away such a guest?

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Zofia Rydet during photographic visit, photo: © Zofia Augustyńska-Martyniak / Zofia Rydet Foundation

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Rydet took over 20,000 photos this way. Contrary to the above words, she gave her models time to change and prepare. They could decide where to sit, and most often they chose the most representative wall of the house as a setting. But she did not allow them to change their position. They had to sit stiffly, upright, not smile and look straight into the lens – ‘so that it looks good, so that it looks the same. So that everyone is the same’.

A sociological record?

The sameness of the compositions provided an opportunity for comparison, for achieving a broader picture. When the documentarian heard the adjective ‘sociological’ (legend has it that it came from an art history professor), it harmonised with her bold and, as she admitted, obsessive determination at some point to enter as many Polish homes as possible. Perhaps it also had to do with her complex about the professional community or with the hope of elevating the status of her collection, which she treated very personally, asking that nothing be thrown away after her death. In both cases, the argument of being scholarly should work. Hence the Sociological Record – but was it really?

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‘Sociological Record 1978–1990’ by Zofia Rydet, photo: © Zofia Augustyńska-Martyniak / Zofia Rydet Foundation

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Wojciech Nowicki, a writer and photographer who was invited to collaborate on the catalogue for the upcoming exhibition and had previously devoted a separate study to the Record, did not hide his doubts about the sociological nature of the cycle. The models were photographed in different rooms of the house and in different configurations: the whole family, married couples, children, one person, etc. The collected material lacked documentary order. The sample was not representative. The author subjectively evaluated the regions she visited – she believed, for example, that Tatra highlanders had more attractive facial features than the inhabitants of the Rzeszów region. In some the author did not appear at all. Nowicki is also right in noting that Rydet went against the workshop of a sociologist, preferring the unique over the typical. She herself admitted this explicitly in the brochure Zofia Rydet o swojej twórczości (Zofia Rydet on Her Work):

Old thatched cottages are disappearing, as are the small wooden houses characteristic of various regions. Old interiors of cottages with rows of holy images are disappearing. Boxes with flat roofs that all look alike, often decorated with small glass or mirror plates, are being built at a rapid pace everywhere in Poland. There are no more wooden walls, and inside there are similar knick-knacks from a thousand and one trinket shops, glassware that is gilded and painted in cherries, various gnomes and dolls, stiff artificial flowers, even though there are such beautiful fresh ones in the garden. This documentation of the truth of contemporary people, their existence shows social changes, changes in the way they think and feel aesthetics and in the way they consume. This is most evident when comparing rural areas to urban ones.

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Zofia Rydet during photographic trip, photo: © Zofia Augustyńska-Martyniak / Zofia Rydet Foundation

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The artist was aware of trends and made a conscious choice about her subject matter. She targeted smaller towns and, above all, ‘villages where there may soon be an artificial lake or a cement factory’. It was rather an ‘emotional, sentimental, somewhat magical’ record, as she admitted in one of her interviews – far from sociological standards in any case. The photographer did not study a social whole (as recommended by Auguste Comte, the first thinker to use the term ‘sociology’); she disregarded typical phenomena (which was insisted upon by the Weberian orientation, which is close to the author of this text); finally, she allowed herself arbitrary freedom in the selection of samples and the organisation of her work (against which the currently most popular academic textbook, Anthony Giddens’s Sociology, warns sociology students).

But what does this mean? A work does not have to be classified as sociological in order to provide sociological questions and reflections. Let us stick to the fact that most of Rydet’s models came from the folk class. Would she have been able to take so many photos if she had knocked on the doors of middle-class or communist nomenklatura apartments? Would their residents have been persuaded by compliments or the ‘papal argument’, which was the promise that the photographs would be given to the Holy Father? (A selection of photographs in which images of John Paul II are depicted did in fact travel to Rome in the form of an album titled Presence.)

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‘Sociological Record 1978–1990’ by Zofia Rydet, photo: © Zofia Augustyńska-Martyniak / Zofia Rydet Foundation

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Low social self-esteem and the resulting need for a sense of dignity may have been the source of folk hospitality - or maybe of a lack of assertiveness towards an uninvited photographer. In this context, who refused to be photographed by Zofia Rydet is symptomatic (as remembered by Wojciech Prażmowski, who accompanied her):

It was June, the grain was already tall; […] I was travelling with Zosia, and we stopped on the side of the road because of what was happening: a woman was walking through the grain. Just as you can imagine the combination of a person wearing a hat, as painted by Wyczółkowski: a straw hat with a hole in the brim […] A woman in a hat is walking, she has a walking stick, and on it she has simply a knotted bundle. We see this, and she [Zofia] says: ‘Stop, stop, I have to take a picture of her!’ I parked the car, and we went to meet this lady. […] A beautiful lady, an elderly lady with a beautiful face, and Zosia says: ‘Oh, how beautiful you look, I have to take your picture, oh, how lovely…’ And this lady speaks up and says, ‘Please do not take my picture because you will cause me great distress’. I was stunned, Zosia was stunned, and the lady walked on, passing us by. Like a ghost. Zosia, confused, didn’t know what this was… […] In beautiful Polish, with her head held high… And Zosia says, ‘She must have been a high-born lady’.

A country house

The home of a high-born person is associated, and not only in Polish culture, with a noble manor house. It is usually distinguished by its classicist structure, columns at the entrance and a representative porch, and above all, a prosperous family life, spent in visits and afternoon teas. Polish readers are familiar with it from Stefan Żeromski’s Przedwiośnie (The Spring to Come, 1925), where they meet the Wielosławski family and their idyllic manor house in Nawłoć. Zofia Rydet’s photographs do not invite us to Nawłoć or its later equivalents. We rather find ourselves in Chłodek, a small manor house with a leaky floor and walls bent with age, where the Wielosławski family’s estate manager had his office, or, more precisely, in the neighbouring peasant cottages, where Cezary Baryka, to the estate manager’s astonishment, was seeking ‘the essence of life’.

Half a century later, Zofia Rydet followed in his footsteps. There is no point in speculating about her intentions and sentiments. Interest in the unknown is natural, and it is not difficult to counteract the fascination of the countryside with that of the city. A more interesting question is the condition in which the photographer found the proverbial Chłodek. The Polish countryside, poor and overpopulated in the interwar period – three quarters of the Polish population lived there – then experienced war, and shortly afterwards saw the long-awaited agricultural reform, brutally implemented by the communist authorities. The allocation of land previously owned by the declassed landed gentry was paralleled by the shifting of national borders and large-scale migrations, followed a few years later by an unsuccessful attempt to collectivise the enlarged peasant farms. The 1950s and 1960s were marked by industrialisation and the exodus of the rural population to cities (the populations of cities and villages became equal around 1965); the 1970s saw a temporary opening of the economy to Western goods, an increase in consumption and the modernisation of living conditions – which, contrary to appearances, also reached the countryside.

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‘Sociological Record 1978–1990’ by Zofia Rydet, photo: © Zofia Augustyńska-Martyniak / Zofia Rydet Foundation

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This is demonstrated by the television set that appears in many of the photographs from the Record. It was placed in a large room, usually in a corner, near the ‘holy images’: wedding photographs, images of the Holy Mother, the aforementioned Pope John Paul II and decorative scarves. This is how a new type of representative corner was created. The television, initially greeted with a mixture of fascination and fear, was eventually recognised as a sacred object. It was not only a window to the world – Rydet recalled that it was left on all day, even though it played only one channel – but also a symbol of success. According to research by Jerzy Szacki (Tradycja i współczesność [Tradition and the Present Day], 1973), 58% of rural residents had regular access to television in 1970, and this number was growing rapidly. These studies, based on a representative nationwide sample, also provided interesting qualitative conclusions, which are worth mentioning here, even though they concerned a period several years earlier than the Record.

Conservative peasants?

It turns out that in a significant number of family memorials and religious images found in the photographs of the Record, one cannot really see a rural specificity. Among the inhabitants of the Polish countryside, 93% claimed to be Catholic, but the figure was only slightly lower, at 83%, among city dwellers. Also, family memorials were more often kept in urban homes than in those in the countryside – if anything, it was hanging them on the walls that was a more rural custom. This would be consistent with a greater attachment to family celebrations (declared by 41% of respondents in the countryside, compared to 19% in the city) and folklore (56% and 36%, respectively).

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Wedding photographs and tapestries depicting regional patterns or hunting motifs, traditionally displayed in rural homes, confirmed the identity of their inhabitants at a time of civilisational change. The tendency towards traditional interior design was particularly evident among those who had no history of migration (in other words, those who did not move onto lands that were formerly German), and it was mainly such people who were visited by the author of the Record. This would explain the accumulation of this type of decoration in her photographs.

However, it would be too easy to conclude that the peasants were simply conservative. Jerzy Szacki’s research suggests something else. When asked about their attitude towards replacing old things with new ones, rural residents most often answered ‘I’m always in favour of new things’. They did so more often than urban residents: 42% and 38%, respectively.

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This type of progressiveness can be viewed more broadly if we add that farmers rated the changes in working conditions, housing and family life that were taking place at that time as best and intellectuals as worst. Rural residents were generally more likely than urban residents to say that people were happier in the 1970s than before (35% and 23%, respectively). Zofia Rydet encountered this optimism, which was sometimes difficult to understand, in her work:

I was in the poorest cottage in the Rzeszów region [Subcarpathia], where the walls were completely falling down, water was leaking in (it happened to be raining), there was no light at all, the floor was indeed ancient, a mud hut with nothing in it; the old woman couldn’t walk, she just moved around like this, the bed was just straw, and she was so cheerful! I asked her how she lived here, in what way. ‘Well, there are good people, they bring me something from time to time, I somehow manage, it doesn’t matter that it’s like this, but then, what I will have later, when God rewards me for this. What a beautiful photograph! She was so good-natured and so pleasant, despite all this poverty.

In spite of the general improvement in living standards, modernity did not reach everywhere. At the end of the Polish People’s Republic, ‘Chłodek’ did not disappear completely (as was noted, for example, by Edward Redliński in Konopielka). From this perspective, one can try to imagine the feelings of those people who finally had leak-proof roofs, more modern flooring and electric lighting, not to mention a television set – feelings of exhaustion mixed with humility because they knew that their fate had been worse and could still be.

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The tiredness of the characters from the Record seems ‘justified’. The photographs show the volume of effort involved: they acquired, wrenched, cut, hemmed, knitted, nailed, cleaned and arranged. Those who have to put the most work into creating a home perhaps best demonstrate its meaning. In this sense, the decorations and paintings are not illustrations of their folk identity – but the result of the universal effort that people undertake to make their surroundings warm and give them a sense of security.

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