Madeleine de Sinéty: photographer captures life through portraits
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Madeleine de Sinéty (1934-2011), a French photographer, is receiving her first major retrospective at the Jeu de Paume museum in Paris.
The exhibition brings together previously unseen photographs from throughout her career, revealing a focus on everyday life and the people within it. Born into an aristocratic family in the Loire Valley, de Sinéty began her artistic journey as a fashion illustrator before dedicating herself to photography.
In 1959, she and journalist Francoise de Saint Marie traveled to Baghdad, marking the start of her lifelong exploration of human experience. She often photographed in black and white, but the current exhibition also displays her color work for the first time. De Sinéty’s photography shifted over time, beginning with her Parisian neighborhood near the Montparnasse train station and expanding to include New York City and the American countryside.
She and her husband, Daniel Behrman, a journalist, documented the lives of railway workers and residents of small towns like Poilley in Brittany, France, where she photographed over 50,000 images in ten years. Her work consistently focused on capturing ordinary moments and the people who lived them. The exhibition at Jeu de Paume is organized by themes, places that become portraits of the people within them.
These include images of steam trains, the changing streets of Montparnasse, children at play, and rural life in Brittany. De Sinéty spent her final twenty-five years in Rangeley, Maine, USA, continuing to document the lives of working people.
