UCLA

This thesis considers Zofia Rydet's unfinished photographic project Sociological Record (1978-90), in particular the section called "People in Interiors." During the last decade of Communism in Poland, Rydet traveled around the Polish countryside, talking her way into village homes so she could photograph inhabitants amid their possessions. Understood by authorities at the time of its making as a useful sociological survey, closer consideration exposes complications. Employing formal analysis, theories of photography, and social history, the essay argues that the project infiltrates and works against the contemporaneous political and social apparatus. Taken as an exemplary case study, Sociological Record demonstrates how art can subvert governmental narratives while ostensibly working within them, unraveling late Communism's claims from the inside.