Un Village

33,280 color slides, 23,076 black and white negatives: it is with this pithy list that one of the hundreds of pages of Madeleine de Sinéty’s diary could have begun. The quality of her relationship with the people she photographed, the drama of their gestures, the intimacy, richness and diversity of the encounters she had in Poilley, a small village 60 kilometers north of Rennes, overflow from all sides of the enormous accumulation of images. Born in 1934, the photographer lived in Poilley from 1972 to 1982. She will then make many trips there from the United States, where she had established her residence. Died in 2011, she will not have had the time to order herself this archive. Only the black and white was partially revealed during an exhibition at the BNF and another at the Museum of Art in Portland. It is therefore without her, with Peter, her son, that we have taken over the collection of color images and that we have tried, as humbly and as faithfully as possible, to shed light on her undertaking, which is neither that of a photographer responding to a commission, nor that of an anthropologist – but the undertaking of an artist sharing the life of a close-knit community, of a rural microcosm in full mutation on the threshold of modernity.

Un village benefits from a publishing grant from the Region of Brittany and the support of the Alliance Française du Maine, Portland, USA.