Zofia Rydet: the woman who wanted to photograph every house in Poland
I don’t think I’m blowing anyone’s mind by saying that hustle culture is one of the worst things to ever happen to art.
There’s the obvious fact that it contributes to a culture dead set on burning us out and leaving us with no energy to do anything other than consume or rest. There’s the other fact that it encourages us to only view things in monetary value, even our hobbies.
However, something that flies under the radar is the fact that it forces us to consider how other people would view our art as a part of its very making. After all, if you want to turn something into a viable side hustle, then you’ve got to also think about whether anyone would want what you’re hawking, which might change what you create.
This is a crying shame because some of the most compelling works of art ever created were created because someone got a crazed, barely achievable, completely unsellable idea in their head. The kind that pops into your head one day and just won’t leave you alone until you try to achieve it. There was no question of turning this project into content or monetising it in any way; it’s an endeavour purely put into practice for the joy of doing it. One of the best examples of this came from Zofia Rydet, the woman behind one of the most ambitious projects in the history of photography.
Born in Stanisławów, Poland, on May 5th, 1911, Rydet’s story is one that’s inspiring on so many levels. Not only is it a story about following your dreams, but it’s also one that shows it’s never too late to follow those dreams. Rydet herself had a childhood love of photography that she put aside to begin working as a young woman. It wasn’t until 1954 that, at the age of 43, she decided to join the Gilwice Photographic Society and try her hand at photography again.
What was the most famous project of Zofia Rydet?
Two decades later, Rydet was a celebrated professional photographer who’d had books of her work published along with several exhibitions staged in her honour. A working woman her entire life, her photography was rooted in social realism. Much of her work centred around depicting the internal life of ordinary people, showing that in every person was a universe, no matter where they came from or what they might look like on the surface. In 1978, Rydet decided to take this drive to its logical extreme.
At the age of 67, she began a project she called “Zapis Socjologiczny” (“Sociological Record”). The goal was simple. Photograph the interior of every single home in Poland. Every. Single. One. Now, obviously, she wasn’t going to achieve this, but Rydet photographed things almost compulsively. She described her urge to document things with her camera as “like an addiction, like vodka for an alcoholic”. So, despite the project being something of a pipe dream, she still devoted the rest of her life to it.
She did one hell of a job on it, too, taking 20,000 photos in total of thousands upon thousands of ordinary homes before her death in 1997 at the age of 86. The project has since become her masterpiece, and while it was as practical as it was achievable, that was never the point of it.
The point of it was to try and make something she was proud of, and hopefully, that’s a lesson we can all learn from at any age.
