"A village": in the eyes of Madeleine de Sinéty

Photograph taken by Madeleine de Sinéty, from the exhibition “Un village” at the GwinZegal Art Center in Guingamp and from the book, published by GwinZegal editions.

© Madeleine de Sinéty

Text by: Olivier Favier

6 min

Madeleine de Sinéty (1934-2011) photographed the village of Poilley in Ille-et-Vilaine for a decade.

If his work in black and white gave rise during his lifetime to exhibitions in Portland and the BNF in Paris, his color slides are presented for the first time in Guingamp, in the Côtes-d'Armor.

A magnificent catalog accompanies the exhibition about to reopen.

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The book is simple and neat, like a family album ready to challenge oblivion.

Color images parade there, distant and yet familiar, at least for those who spent a little of their childhood in the countryside before the end of the 1980s. They are followed by extracts from a diary written in school notebooks between 1974 and 1976 and patiently transcribed almost fifty years later.

The rural France that is revealed there is closer, in places, to medieval miniatures of the

Très Riches Heures of the Duke of Berry

or to the Picardy interiors of the Le Nain brothers than to this diagonal of the void with the false air of the peri-urban area which today takes its place. 'hui.

Eternity less a day

The new world creeps in almost everywhere in this stillness which crumbles, behind the eyes, for example, of Béatrice, a little girl staring at the lens of Madeleine de Sinéty, in the form of a television on the screen domed and round angles, touching as are the phantasmagorical visions of a past modernity.

Agriculture is already partly mechanized, but another young girl climbs on the huge bundle of wood of a cart hung on a draft horse.

We are in Brittany, somewhere between Fougères and Mont-Saint-Michel, on the edge of Normandy.

The village has a few hundred inhabitants and looks like thousands of others elsewhere in France, and it is obviously a coincidence that Madeleine de Sinéty came to settle there in July 1972 for ten years, photographing everyday life. of its new neighbors, in black and white for art and in color for friends.

From a distance, however, it is the saturated tones of the Kodachrome slides that move and permeate our memory.

Madeleine de Sinéty, as you will have understood, was all the greater because she never tried to be.

All this time of his life will have spent building a single report, more than fifty-five thousand photographs now archived at the Nicéphore-Niépce museum in Chalon-sur-Saône, which his youngest son, Peter Behrman de Sinéty, and Jérôme Sotter, the director of the

GwinZegal

Art

Center

in Guingamp, went through the process of extracting some two hundred pictures to exhibit and as many or more to show in a slide show in a sort of back room of the exhibition space.

Photograph taken by Madeleine de Sinéty, from the exhibition “Un village” at the GwinZegal Art Center in Guingamp and from the book, published by GwinZegal editions.

© Madeleine de Sinéty

The world as it is

It is here again that they are best received, lulled by the hypnotic sound of three photoprojectors with a slightly shifted rhythm which construct always different triptychs.

This is more or less how they were originally presented, in the darkness of a barn, for the inhabitants themselves.

On a failed slide, Madeleine de Sinéty scratched the title of the evening, the final word or greetings.

The one who had grown up in a castle on the banks of the Loire, watched as a little girl the other children of the neighboring peasants playing in freedom.

Among the children she stubbornly photographs in Poilley, is also her eldest son.

In the village, the pig is still being killed, its cries have haunted entire generations - those whom slaughterhouses suffocate today in series - and Madeleine de Sinéty photographs these gestures as those of a ritual, of a sacrifice.

Balls, weddings and funerals - this improbable vision of a coffin stored in a Citroën station wagon - are other chosen moments, with apple picking, which come back alongside more ordinary moments, but which all say a real intimacy, woven over the years.

In 1981, Madeleine de Sinéty moved to the United States, where she joined her husband.

Her newborn son Peter, who grows up with the names of all these people pictured.

In his eyes, they form like a mythological family, which he glimpses during the visits his mother makes to the village during her returns to France.

He now lives in Paris where he translates, among other things, the works of Pierre Guyotat.

The latter was working on the foreword of the catalog when death won the day in February 2020. There remains a highly meaningful sentence placed at the head of the catalog: “ 

These photographs are the world as it is.

 "

►

Madeleine de Sinéty,

Un village

, Éditions GwinZegal, 2020. € 35.

The exhibition remains closed to the public pending further government guidance.

However, it will be extended, from its legal reopening, until March 28, 2021 at the GwinZegal center in Guingamp, before being presented at the Nicéphore-Niépce museum in Chalon-sur-Saône and at the Brittany museum in Rennes, during 2021.

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