This is the story of a unique encounter between Poilley, a small rural village of 500 inhabitants 60 kilometres north of Rennes, and a Parisian illustrator with a passion for photography.
It all began on 1 July 1972. Some twenty years later, Madeleine de Sinéty, who passed away in 2011, would recount:
“As I was driving back to Paris after a trip to southern Brittany, I suddenly found myself stuck in the stream of Parisians rushing to the coast on that first day of the holidays. I left the congested main road for a small country lane and decided to stop for the night in the most remote village I could find.”
In her car, the Parisian illustrator—who always carries a bicycle with her—decided upon waking the next day to explore the countryside by bike, whilst waiting to be able to get back on the road. She then met Maria Touchard and her granddaughter Béatrice, who was five years old at the time. Four years later, Maria would become her son’s godmother.
In the meantime, Madeleine had fallen in love at first sight and changed her life. Fascinated since childhood by country life, she moved to Poilley, where she lived from 1972 to 1981. She spent that decade travelling around farms and hamlets, camera perpetually slung round her neck, producing a vast body of work: 33,280 colour slides, 23,076 black-and-white negatives of the people of Poilley and their daily lives, whether working on the farm, slaughtering a pig, milking the cows or bringing in the hay, at school or in their leisure time.
