a Breton village of 500 inhabitants comes back to life

“These centuries-old houses of hard and severe stone, crowded silently around the haughty and sad church, this is my country,” wrote Madeleine de Sinéty (1934-2011). However, nothing predestined this penniless aristocrat, established in Paris, divorced and soon remarried to an American journalist, to put down roots in these Breton lands.

On July 1, 1972, traffic jams prevented him from reaching the capital. So she decides to spend “a night in the most lost village (she) can find”. It will be Poilley, 60 km northeast of Rennes, 500 souls. Immediate crush. There she meets Maria Touchard, a septuagenarian farmer, and her granddaughter Béatrice, 5 years old, who will introduce her to their peasant community, teach her everything about their lives and their gestures, which Madeleine will reproduce as much as she captures them with her camera.

At 38, the Parisian moved to Ille-et-Vilaine for eight years. Then, leaving in 1980 with her family for the United States – which inspired another part of her work, also presented in this retrospective – she returned punctually. In 1990, the Poillénnais even asked her to rephotograph their village “before it was too late”.

Agricultural consolidation and the difficulty young people have in taking over family farms have profoundly changed the town. In addition to 33,000 color slides and 23,000 black and white negatives, the photographer immortalized a rural microcosm where modernity found its way.