2011 sees the Centenary of Zofia Rydet’s birth. Considered to be one of Polands leading contemporary photographers Karol Jozwiak will guide you through her career until her death in 1997.
The tensions of realism – on the output of Zofia Rydet
Zofia Rydet is known mostly from her enormous cycle of Sociological Record. It concerns includes over 30 000 negatives, preserving a lot of places and people which are not existing anymore. She started this series at the end of 70s, photographing common people in their houses. But then the series has become a huge documentation of the Polish village. She photographed interiors and exteriors of the houses, walls full of the decorations, and first of all people. Nevertheless this cycle was just a last stage of her huge output. Before, in 60s and 70s she created a big series of the Word of Feelings and Imagination which was a kind of a surrealistic series of photo-montages. Thus, there is a kind of tension between those two diferent series. In The Arc of Realism, the tight line of Zofia Rydet’s creative work, we notcie the dilemma of a photographer who wants to be a documentalist true to reality on the one hand, and aspires to become an artist, a visionary, creating a kind of synthetic over-reality, soaring above realism on the other. The final stage of her work shows that the artist overcame the dilemma and set out to retell the reality with total accuracy. However, it seems that for Zofia Rydet, a master of photo-montage and poetic creation, the decision was neither easy nor obvious.
Info
Date: 12.30pm 2 July
Centre for Creative Practice
15 Pembroke Street Lower
Dublin 2
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