Pictures on Pictures
Lecture by Łukasz Zaremba

This is an attempt at going, in the interpretation of Zofia Rydet’s work, beyond the relationship (often opposition) between documentary and art, between the product of a sociological, ethnographic imagination etc. and a “naïve conceptualism” that has determined the understanding of Rydet’s Record and her other projects.

This attempt hinges on emphasizing the metapictorial character of Zofia Rydet’s Record: pictures replete with other pictures; pictures that comment on the social life of visual representations rather than on Rydet’s sitters; and finally, pictures whose interpretational and theoretical potential seems to become apparent only in abundance, repetition and seriality (the seriality of Rydet’s photographs themselves as well as the multiplicity and repetitive character of the pictures that appear in them).

Zofia Rydet’s photographs are thus to be interpreted as enunciations on pictures, containing classifications and diagnoses as to the relationships within the “society” of images – which are not always congruent with the traditional divisions according to genre, art practice, or medium.

Łukasz Zaremba - Scholar of visuality, associated with the Muzeum Sztuki in Lodz and the Institute of Polish Culture, University of Warsaw, editor at View. Theories and Practices of Visual Culture; translator, among his research interests are conflicts in the sphere of visuality and theories of the image.

See also: