A Life Through the Lens

In 1972, a thirty-eight-year-old Parisian - an aristocrat by birth, a fashion illustrator by profession - settled in a Breton hamlet of five hundred inhabitants, sixty kilometers from Rennes. Her name was Madeleine de Sinéty, she had just discovered photography, and she decided to dedicate her life to it. She would spend ten years there. Fifty thousand images later, not a single exhibition. Fifteen years after her death, the Jeu de Paume finally dedicated her first retrospective.

The story could have been nothing more than an heiress's exoticism - the Loire Valley is playing with the peasants. It is quite the opposite. Sinéty doesn't photograph Poilley, she lives there. She shares the farm work, family meals, the pig roasts, the evening gatherings, the weddings, the funerals. Neither commissioner nor anthropologist; simply there - long enough for the camera to disappear from view. Her notebooks record first names, words of dialect, the times of departure for the fields. As early as 1985, she repeated the same gesture in Rangeley, Maine. There she joined her American husband, Daniel Behrman, became a chronicler of a rural America without statues, and died there in 2011. Before these two immersions, there had been Paris: the demolition of Montparnasse, the last working-class cafés, the steam trains and their railway workers. Her entire oeuvre can be summed up in the same straight line—to stay.

Did you know?

Madeleine de Sinéty didn't buy her first camera until her late thirties. Daniel Behrman, an American journalist she met in the late 1960s, had convinced her. They married in 1978, when she had already been living in Poilley for six years. He would later join her in Maine.

JEU DE PAUME
From June 12 to September 24, 2026
1 Place de la Concorde, 75001 - Metro Concorde (Line 1)
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