Madeleine de Sinéty. Une vie

This exhibition, which highlights several entirely new series of photographs, is the first retrospective dedicated to Madeleine de Sinéty (1934-2011), whose work was little shown during her lifetime: only her black and white work had been partially unveiled, notably during an exhibition at the Bibliothèque nationale de France in 1996 and another in the United States, at the Portland Museum of Art in Maine in 2011.

Her solitary work, built away from commissions and publications, intertwined with her daily life and her back-and-forth trips between France and the United States.

Born in a château in the Loire Valley destroyed by fire when she was fourteen, Madeleine de Sinéty began her artistic journey in Paris in the mid-1960s as a fashion illustrator for magazines.

The desire to create seems to have always driven her; she could have written or painted, but it was photography that combined the greatest number of her aspirations and ultimately prevailed.

After studying at the École des arts décoratifs de Paris, she began photographing as a self-taught artist, in both colour and black and white.

Tentatively at first, in 1970, with images of her neighbourhood – the area around Montparnasse station, then undergoing major changes – then in the streets of New York, where she stayed several times with her husband Daniel Behrman, an American journalist she met in Paris; finally, around steam trains, a childhood passion that she thus extended with this medium.

It was also there that she found another distance with her subjects: she befriended railway workers, took their portraits, shared their rest periods, and discovered the realities of the working world.

Madeleine de Sinéty's production is most often inseparable from her everyday life: in the small village of Poilley in Brittany – where she settled in the 1970s and took more than 50,000 shots over about ten years – as well as in Rangeley in the United States, her residence for the last twenty-five years of her life.

There, she photographed from within the communities that adopted her – relatives, families, friends, and acquaintances – the activities and events, as well as the rhythm of the seasons.

With a constant desire to document and bear witness, she captured customs, gestures, places, practices – many of which were destined to disappear – attempting, day after day and with a touch of nosta