In 1978, there were 35 million people living in Poland, but that didn’t stop Zofia Rydet trying to photograph the homes of every single one. That summer, the 67-year-old began the monumental project she called her “sociological record,” travelling the length and breadth of her country on foot and by bus.

By the time she died, in 1997, the series, which is currently on show at the Museum of Modern Art in Warsaw, comprised nearly 20,000 images from more than 100 villages and towns.

Credit: © 2068/12/31 Zofia Augustyńska-Martyniak/Zofia Rydet

Credit: © 2068/12/31 Zofia Augustyńska-Martyniak/Zofia Rydet

She was inspired to begin her quest after seeing a hall that had been transformed into office cubicles, where each employee had decorated their space differently. “The things I saw!” she said, during a 1990 interview, “Beautiful girls and holy icons. Jazz stars and photos of children. Hunting trophies and rosaries. Each person marked his space with his personality. And that’s how it began.”

Credit: © 2068/12/31 Zofia Augustyńska-Martyniak/Zofia Rydet

Over the years Rydet perfected a particular method for obtaining the best portrait possible. “I knock on the door, I say ‘hello’ and shake hands. I enter the home, look around carefully, and I immediately see something beautiful, something unusual, and I compliment it. The owner is pleased that I like it, and then I take the first photograph. Everyone has something in his house that is most precious to him. If I manage to notice this, then this person submits at once.”

Credit: © 2068/12/31 Zofia Augustyńska-Martyniak/Zofia Rydet

Gradually she organised her survey into categories, too – women on doorsteps, windows, tapestries, televisions. “The focal point in the village is the television set, which is on all day,” she explained. “There are generally few books. What is most precious (often a portrait of Pope John Paul II) goes on top of the television.”

At one house in Podhale, she saw a picture of the Virgin Mary in a hut, alongside portraits of Communist politicians Gierek and Brezhnev. “I asked how these could be hanging next to the holy picture. Then the highlander told me: ‘I believe in the Holy Mother and I praise her. Gierek and Brezhnev can lick my ass, but they protect me when someone important drops by.’”

Credit: © 2068/12/31 Zofia Augustyńska-Martyniak/Zofia Rydet

Rydet preferred photographing rural homes to those in the city, whose interiors she found sterile and uniform. She believed wholeheartedly in the socio-historical value of her endeavour, convinced that her pictures of personal objects and private spaces defined the people who owned them, and “revealed their psychology.”

Rydet was born in 1911, to a well-to-do family in what is now Ukraine. As a child she longed to study at the Academy of Fine Arts, but, obeying her parents’ wishes, enrolled at a school of economics for women, which was actually little more than a finishing school. It was her younger brother, Tadeusz, who encouraged her to begin taking pictures with a camera during the 1930s, but she didn’t begin photography in earnest until the 1950s, when she began entering contests and establishing connections with other practitioners.

She had already exhibited several of her works by the time she began work on the Sociological Record, but these rather fell by the wayside once she had fully committed to her magnum opus. During the final years of her life she became too weak to continue travelling around the country and turned to making collages at home.

Before she died at the age of 86, she was asked if she had a prescription for old age. She replied: “Photography gives me the chance to stop time and overcome the spectre of death. The simplest, most ordinary documentary picture becomes a great truth about human fate, and this is my constant struggle with death, with the passing of time.”

Zofia Rydet: Record, 1978–1990, is at the Museum of Modern Art, Warsaw, until January 10 2016