Madeleine de Sinéty’s archive has finally found the scale it deserves in Paris
A photographer who spent years recording people at work and at home is now the subject of a major survey at the Jeu de Paume. Madeleine de Sinéty: A Life brings together images from France and the United States, along with journals that sharpen the sense of how closely she observed the worlds around her. The exhibition runs from 12 June to 27 September.
De Sinéty, born in 1934 and dead in 2011 at 77, built a body of work that moves between rural life, labor, and urban transformation. Much of the material on view was made between 1972 and 1982 in Poilley, a small village in northern France, where she produced 33,280 color slides and 23,076 black-and-white negatives. That archive, first brought into sharper focus by a 2020 exhibition at the Centre d’art GwinZegal in Brittany, prompted Quentin Bajac, director of the Jeu de Paume, to look more closely.
Working with de Sinéty’s son, Peter, Bajac and Jerôme Sother had a storage container of her work shipped from the US, where she lived from 1980. What emerged was a vast, largely unorganized record of a life spent photographing with unusual persistence. Sother has noted that many photographers eventually slow down long enough to sort their archives. De Sinéty never did.
The exhibition places her images of Montparnasse and New York’s Meatpacking District alongside scenes from northern France and Maine, where she photographed farm laborers, steam railwaymen, greengrocers, and butchers. Across those settings, she returned to places and professions that were already under pressure from change. Her pictures carry a quiet urgency: they register not nostalgia, but attention.
That sensibility is reinforced by her use of color. At a time when black and white still dominated serious photography, de Sinéty worked extensively in color, giving her pictures a vividness that now feels strikingly contemporary. Sother has described her work as alive in part because of her closeness to the people she photographed. She lived with them, shared their lives, and worked alongside them.
The Jeu de Paume is also showing several of her journals, which reveal a writer with a precise, elegant voice and an almost anthropological eye. In 1996, reflecting on the Poilley series, she wrote that it captured a relationship that had not fundamentally changed: the bond between villagers, the land they worked, and the livestock they raised. In Paris, that statement gives the exhibition its emotional center as much as its historical one.
