PARIS.- This exhibition is the first retrospective devoted to Madeleine de Sinéty (1934-2011) whose unique photographic work, in colour and black and white, is still relatively little-known, even though it spans four decades and two continents: Europe (France) and the United States.
Born in a Loire Valley château that was destroyed by a fire when she was fourteen, Madeleine de Sinéty trained as a fashion illustrator at the Decorative Arts School in Paris before teaching herself photography in the late 1960s. Timidly at first, in 1970, she shot her neighbourhood around Montparnasse Station in Paris, an area then undergoing rapid change, furtively photographing street scenes and faces. She would do the same in the streets of New York, where she travelled with her husband, Daniel Behrman, an American journalist met in Paris. Together, they harboured a childhood passion for steam trains, which she photographed tirelessly. It was here, in Montparnasse, that she found her position or place with her subjects: she befriended railway workers, took their portraits, shared their rest time, and discovered the realities of the working class.
This closeness, a true hallmark of her work, was further accentuated when she impulsively decided to leave her Parisian life behind and settle for ten years in the small village of Poilley, Brittany. There, she got to know the inhabitants, helping them with their farm work, and gradually integrated into the community, which welcomed her with curiosity and kindness. She immediately had the feeling that she would stay there for a long time; it was in this place that she wanted to live and create.
She photographed the twenty or so families living in Poilley, their farms, and the locals who became like her own family. The resulting document is unique: over 50,000 images chronicle the life of this village where men and women still worked alongside animals on their land, in tune with the rhythm of the seasons. She would bring this immense archive of Poilley with her when she followed her American husband to begin a new life in the United States, primarily in the small town of Rangeley, Maine. There, once again, she photographed a community, and after her husband’s death, she became a wedding and event photographer to earn a living.
Following the major stages of her life, this exhibition showcases several series of photographs, most of which have never been shown before. The common denominator is a desire to document the lifestyles, practices, professions, and places destined to disappear or on the verge of disappearing.
At the beginning of her career in Paris, she developed a fascination for the old Montparnasse district with its artists’ studios, slated for demolition in order to make way for the Tour Montparnasse and the new train station. It was under the title “Paris démoli” (Demolished Paris) that she would group these images of a capital whose streets still bore the presence of its working-class population with labourers’ cafés, and children playing—a memory or dying way of life that she sought to preserve.
At the same time, with her partner, she spent time visiting train stations and travelling along secondary railway lines in France and Germany, photographing locomotives and railway workers, driven by a passion for the last steam trains still in operation, which, in her eyes, epitomized the romantic dimension of travel.
In New York, in the early morning, she enjoyed wandering through the Meatpacking District, an area where slaughterhouses were concentrated in Lower Manhattan, capturing menial trade workers going about their business. Her images show animal carcasses being loaded, a vendor’s handcart with fruit, workers warming themselves around makeshift fires near the railway tracks.
In Poilley, a small village in Ille-et-Vilaine, her focus was on documenting the changing rural world, capturing its everyday gestures: slaughtering pigs, working with animals, the harvest. Accepted by the local community, she was allowed access to private homes and village festivals, and she occasionally organized screenings of her images at the village hall.
In Rangeley, on the other side of the Atlantic, from the 1980s onwards, she encountered yet another close-knit rural community, and over the years, she became the town’s official photographer, immortalizing rituals, both private and public: weddings, graduations, and school outings.
In the early 1970s, Madeleine de Sinéty wrote in the journal she kept over several decades: “Maybe I should only do photography, not drawing? And yet I’d like to be able to render life with a bit of paper and a pencil. Photography is merely faster than my hands. What I see is the same and I’m touched by the same things.”
Her entire photographic oeuvre describes a unique journey and deeply rooted documentary and social concerns. The fragility of human beings and their lives, places and practices, appears as the leitmotif, enhanced by a poetic use of colour and light.
Her photographic focus shines a light on the ordinary lives of simple people, the invisible ones, those whose stories are not told, or who do not have the ability to write it themselves: workers, peasants, single women, or women dependent on social welfare.
During her lifetime, very few of her images were actually shown to the public: Madeleine de Sinéty spent her entire life photographing on her own, never responding to commissions or publishing in magazines. She exhibited only twice: at the Bibliothèque nationale de France in 1996 and at the Museum of Art in Portland (Maine, USA) in 2010. In both cases, only her black-and-white work was shown.
It was only in 2020 that the GwinZegal Art Centre dedicated an exhibition and a book (Un village) to Madeleine de Sinéty, based on a collection of her colour photographs donated to the Musée Niépce in Chalon-sur-Saône. This was the beginning of a (re)discovery of her work. Today, the archive, comprising several hundred thousand images, is housed at the Médiathèque de la photographie et du patrimoine, with whose help this exhibition—the first of its kind—has been organized.
Curators:
Jérôme Sother et Quentin Bajac
