When Madeleine de Sinéty was a child, during summers at her great-grandmother’s château in the Loire valley, she would gaze down from her third-floor attic window at the château’s farmyard. “I could smell all the scents of the farm – cut hay, warm manure, curdled milk – but I couldn’t go there,” she later recalled. Due to her privileged background, the farm she longed to visit, just metres away, was strictly out of bounds.
Decades later, in 1972, De Sinéty, then aged 37, was driving back to Paris from Brittany when she turned off the jammed highway and decided to stop for the night in “the most out-of-the-way village I could find”. This was Poilley, a commune of about 20 farms arranged around a granite church. The next day, De Sinéty, a fashion illustrator and keen amateur photographer, visited a local farm (“for the first time, there was nobody there to stop me from entering,” she noted in her diary) and asked the woman of the house and her granddaughter if she could take their picture. They agreed and an immediate bond was formed.
Over the next 10 years De Sinéty spent most of her time in Poilley connecting with the way of life that was out of reach during her childhood and was beginning to vanish due to industrialisation. She wasn’t afraid to get her hands dirty. In her diary she recorded days in the fields learning to thin the beets, which required “advanc[ing] on all fours in the middle of the furrow”, and nights in stables attending heavily pregnant mares. Her camera was always at the ready, and as the people of Poilley came to accept her, she was allowed in to document their homes, parties and weddings. She would then project her photographs in the village hall for all to see.
What stands out in these images, on show at Jeu de Paume in Paris, is De Sinéty’s connection with the local children. Unlike her adolescent self, these youngsters are fully immersed in the countryside lifestyle, weaving fun and games into their farmyard duties. Joining the grownups for an apple-picking session, a bunch of them end up running around with buckets on their heads and crawling about a trailer of picked apples like it’s a ball pool. They’re involved, to varying degrees, in butchering pigs, mucking out stables and gathering autumn hay. De Sinéty seems to revel in their muddy-shoed mischief. Denied it herself as a child, she’s delightedly making up for lost time.
Madeleine de Sinéty: A Life is at Jeu de Paume, Paris, until 27 September