Best known for her monumental unfinished series Sociological Record (from 1978 to the early 1990s), Zofia Rydet also experimented with collage, introducing surreal and psychedelic themes into her work, distinct from her documentary practice, as early as the mid-1960s. Through poetically juxtaposing her own photographs, Rydet revisited wartime experiences while expressing fears of a potential new global disaster.

Her series of poetic photomontages The World of Feelings and Imagination is composed of black-and-white photographic collages arranged into 15 sequences, which the artist referred to as songs. The series focuses on the life of women, from birth, childhood and growing up, to motherhood, solitary old age, and death. But Rydet also introduces the motif of apocalypse, the possible destruction of the planet by a looming world war, preventable only through deep humanism.

Rydet composed the collages exclusively from photos she had taken herself. The series is one of the most frequently reproduced and cited works of 20th-century Polish photography. Because of similar motifs—fragmentation of the body and afterimages of war atrocities—it corresponds to works by artists such as Alina Szapocznikow and Andrzej Wróblewski.

In 1979, the series was published as a standalone book. Along with Rydet’s Little Man (1965) and Presence (1989), it forms a triptych of photography books—a rare example in the history of Polish art of an artist framing a publication as an exhibition of their work. During Rydet's lifetime, The World of Feelings and Imagination was also presented in the form of a slide show with music. The artist’s archive includes slides and an audio cassette with a musical soundtrack and a score setting the order and rhythm of the presented images. Rydet thought of this series in filmic terms and considered it a dramatic spectacle conjuring specific responses in the viewer, such as sadness or reflection.

[S.C]