It wasn’t until her mid-forties that she began taking pictures as a self-taught photographer, yet Zofia Rydet became one of the best-known Polish photographers ever. Due to a love affair, she visited Hungary several times in the sixties and seventies. Her images vividly captured the everyday life of children and the elderly as well as the bustling world of traditional Budapest markets.
A prominent figure in the history of Polish photography, Zofia Rydet was born in 1911 and started photographing only in the fifties when she already was more than forty years old. Prior to that, she was a retailer, and then worked as a salesperson, and she also was an associate at the Orbis travel agency for some time. She learned the basics of photography from her brother. Although Rydet was most interested in photographing childhood and old age, she also made surrealistic dioramas and a photo book.
Zofia Rydet started her magnum opus, the Sociological Record in 1978 and carried on with it earnestly until the end of her life. In this venture, she set out the monumental aim of documenting every Polish family and home, and she did take more than twenty thousand photographs of ordinary people in living rooms and courtyards. This ensemble of black-and-white photos came out as a strange composite of a statistical data collection and Rydet’s personal confession about humankind and the family of man. The images are emotional and impassive, factual and subjective at the same time. After the data acquisition period ended in 1997 with the photographer’s death, Rydet soon rose to world fame.
Today, in addition to the biggest Polish museums, her prints feature in the greatest international institutions like the MoMA in New York and the Centre Pompidou in Paris.
However, what is rather uncommon, her negatives stayed with the family where the estate is managed by a foundationsince 2011. That is how her pictures ended up on Fortepan as well. In the early summer this year, after a reader signaled that they had stumbled upon Budapest photos within the Rydet collection, Fortepan reached out to the Foundation with a request to publish her images taken in Hungary.
The photographer visited the country five times; and according to her correspondence in the family archive, that was partly due to a love affair she maintained with a Hungarian lawyer.
She made the most outstanding nearly one hundred-frame Hungary series in the city of Győr in 1967 when she participated in an exhibition as a member of the Gliwice Photo Club. En route, she also spent several days in Budapest – photographing, and the images taken in the capital fit into the Rydetian photographic world documenting the barely visible passing of Central European time.
Her urban pictures are showing old doorways, chimneys, house extensions, and empty streets. The typical figures appearing in her Hungary photos, just like in her other photos, are elderly people and children, as if she was fascinated by the beginning and the end of human life the most. She made two major series in Budapest, both inside market halls. One was shot in the Fény Street Market Hall, and the other was taken in the Dimitrov Square Market Hall (today Central Market Hall at Fővám Square). Today’s viewer might notice that despite the dilapidated overall impression and general poverty, Budapest markets were lively venues full of rustic vibes, maintaining some of the turn-of-the-century character of the multi-ethnic capital. Rosehips, snowdrops, live animals, honey – imagining the sounds and smells to the merchants, one can feel ripped out of the apathy of Hungarian socialism and dropped into the middle of a pleasant short story by Józsi Jenő Tersánszky or Iván Mándy. (By the eighties, this timeless archaic world of markets was almost completely gone.)
From Rydet’s photos, it is obvious that she was not a tourist here. There are no signs of the modern Budapest in the pictures, and the lack of Elizabeth Bridge is especially striking. From this period, it’s hard to find any photo series of the city that would not include this white bridge which still appears as modern today.
The images she shot have never appeared in print, the street pictures and intimate portraits taken with her SLR camera existed only on negatives. And now, fifty years later, by the courtesy of her family, the camera-prepared space and time sections of Zofia Rydet can finally be seen for the first time – on Fortepan.
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For more photos, visit the Zofia Rydet Foundation's homepage.
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Written by Miklós Tamási | Photos selected by István Virágvölgyi
You can find further articles in the Weekly Fortepan series at hetifortepan.capacenter.hu . The blog is realized in the cooperation of Fortepan and the Capa Center.
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This article is published under the Creative Commons CC BY-ND 2.5 HU (Attribution - Derivatives) license; therefore it is freely shareable with due attribution, but it shall not be edited (see the Blog’s impressum for details.)
Cover photo: Fortepan / Zofia Rydet
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Credits:
Zofia Rydet/Fortepan