This exhibition, which brings to light several completely unpublished series of photographs, is the first retrospective devoted to Madeleine de Sinéty (1934–2011), whose work was rarely exhibited during her lifetime: only her black-and-white work had been partially shown, notably in an exhibition at the Bibliothèque nationale de France in 1996 and another in the États-Unis, at the Portland Museum of Art in Maine in 2011.
Her solitary body of work, created independently of commissions and publications, became intertwined with her daily life and her journeys between France and the États-Unis. Born in a château in the Val de Loire that was destroyed by fire when she was fourteen, Madeleine de Sinéty began her artistic career in Paris in the mid-1960s as a fashion illustrator for magazines. The desire to create seems always to have driven her; she might have written or painted, but photography brought together the greatest number of her aspirations and ultimately prevailed. After studying at the École des arts décoratifs de Paris, she taught herself photography, working in both color and black and white. Tentatively at first, in 1970, with images of her neighborhood—the area around gare Montparnasse, then undergoing major change—then in the streets of New York, where she stayed several times with her husband Daniel Behrman, an American journalist she had met in Paris; and finally around steam trains, a childhood passion she continued to pursue through this medium. It was also there that she found a different kind of connection with her subjects: she befriended railway workers, took their portraits, spent their breaks with them, and discovered the realities of working-class life. Madeleine de Sinéty’s work is most often inseparable from her everyday life: in the small village of Poilley in Bretagne—where she settled in the 1970s and took more than 50,000 photographs over the course of a decade—as well as in Rangeley in the États-Unis, where she lived for the final twenty-five years of her life. From within, she photographed the communities that embraced her—loved ones, families, friends, and acquaintances—their activities and events, as well as the rhythm of the seasons. Driven by a constant desire to document and bear witness, she captured customs, gestures, places, and practices—many of them destined to disappear—trying, day after day and with a touch of nostalgia, to preserve their fleeting grace and delicate colors. This longing for memory and remembrance can also be found in the diary she kept at various points in her life, excerpts from which are presented in the exhibition as a counterpoint to her photographs.
Admission: From 0 to 14 euros.
Source: paris.fr — photo: Succession Madeleine de Sinéty