The Village Photographer

One July day in 1972, a French photographer named Madeleine de Sinéty got stuck in traffic on her way back to Paris from the countryside. “I left the jammed highway for a small country road,” she later remembered, “and decided to stop for the night in the most out-of-the way village I could find.” The tiny farming settlement of Poilley, in Brittany, would become her home for the next eight years, and the subject of more than 50,000 intimate, often unsettling photographs. Sinéty developed a knack for finding within quotidian domestic and village scenes—a woman brushing her hair, a picnic in the sun—a dreamlike sense of mystery.Sinéty’s first retrospective, on view now at the Jeu de Paume, marks a growing interest in an artist whose work was barely published, and only twice exhibited, in her lifetime. (She died in 2011.) Like her American contemporaries Saul Leiter and Joel Meyerowitz, Sinéty shot color photographs in a soft yet vivid palette. In Poilley she was especially drawn to the chaotic and the surreal: pigs butchered on kitchen tables next to bored kids; toddlers hacking away at apple trees with long wooden poles; a lordly gray-haired woman in a floral dress and sunglasses pr...