Bio: Sarah Farmer, Associate Professor of History at the University of California, Irvine, is currently working on a book about  social practices and cultural representations that recast and reinvented French rural life and landscapes in response to the rapid modernization projects of the postwar economic boom (1945–1975).   As the traditional peasant disappeared as a laborer, the image of the peasant and rural landscapes exerted an ever-stronger grip on the French imagination. Farmer's presentation to the Stanford French Culture Seminar examines the autobiographical work of Raymond Depardon, one of the most celebrated working photographers in France today.