portraits of women, girls, peasant wives

For over ten years, starting in 2013, Alexis Vettoretti took his 4×5 camera out of his car. Before knocking on farm doors, then entering the kitchens to capture the traces of a peasant world that is disappearing. “Photography is a silent dialogue with the past, a means of freezing faces and places which, otherwise, would fade away gently, without noise,” he explains in the preface to the incredibly touching book which has just been published by Ulmer.

Their names are Paulette, Marie-Yvonne, Marie-Thérèse, Ghislaine, Angèle, Lucienne or Ginette. They live in Ardèche, Morbihan, Vendée, Yonne, Sarthe, Gers or Haute-Loire. All were born in the 1930s or 1940s. They all have incredible eyes. They all talk about their daily lives and their conditions, their regrets or their joys, captured by the lens of the documentary photographer who collects and reports their words and…