In June 1983, photographer Guy Hersant opened a year-long commission in Saint-Jean-Brévelay and the surrounding communes of the Morbihan for the Centre Pompidou's BPI library, at a time when the Breton countryside was stirring under a wave of modernity: land consolidation, mechanisation, free-stall barns and milking parlours, maize silage, farm buildings breaking from older architecture, generational separation and the Common Agricultural Policy. Partnered with the CNRS rural sociology group, the mission aimed to document this great turning point in Breton agriculture, with Hersant's photographic harvest amounting, beyond its form, to an ethnographic survey of the rural society's transformation at the close of the twentieth century.