Madeleine de Sinéty, a Life: the Retrospective Exhibition at the Jeu de Paume

French-American photographer Madeleine de Sinéty is in the spotlight at Jeu de Paume: a major retrospective, the first devoted to the artist, is scheduled from June 12 to September 27, 2026. The exhibition Une vie brings together forty years of work and photographs, highlighting stories that have been overlooked, stories that have vanished.

Madeleine de Sinéty began photography in the late 1960s, self-taught. She trains her lens on the invisible, the forgotten: rural workers whose way of life is fading away. Farmers, railway workers, factory workers, traders, butchers, single women, people dependent on social assistance... The artist immortalizes their daily life, their ordinary lives often overlooked by other media and artists.

The photographer is drawn to vanishing worlds: evolving cities, changing neighborhoods, villages and long-held traditions left behind by the march of modernization. It’s in the Breton village of Poilley that Madeleine de Sinéty launches her most ambitious project: a collection of more than 50,000 photographs that document every facet of this rural microcosm from the 1970s. Fieldwork and domestic life, village fetes, the passage of the seasons, the interiors of homes—this monumental undertaking captures, with exacting detail, a disappearing universe, threatened by social and economic transformation.

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Madeleine de Sinéty is passionate about steam trains and the daily life of railway workers. In her archives, there are also images of the old Montparnasse district, before the artists’ quarter was erased by the station’s reconfiguration and the installation of offices.

In the United States, where she lives with her husband, Madeleine de Sinéty pursues her long-standing interests. She photographs weddings, school ceremonies, protests, markets, workers gathered at dawn, and the vendors delivering their goods... Rural life, whether in France or across the Atlantic, unfolds with poetry and fragility through the photographer’s lens.

The journey is enriched by excerpts from the artist’s diary, where she records her relationship with the world and the lives that captivate her so deeply. The exhibition follows a chronological arc, tracing Madeleine de Sinéty’s evolution from her tentative beginnings to her most celebrated series.

Curator of a memory, of fading traditions, Madeleine de Sinéty is once again in the spotlight at Jeu de Paume this summer. Don’t miss this retrospectiveunprecedented.