For several years now, photographer Floriane de Lassée has been building Night Views, a series in which vast cityscapes and the intimate lives of the people who inhabit them are brought together in provocative fusion.
The superb photography in Night Views takes us from the collective to the intimate, from the infinitely large to the infinitely small: at first glance, sweeping urban landscapes bring us up against the impersonal face of the big city. But a closer look reveals the presence of residents, caught unawares as they move within the privacy of their intimate spaces. Inside their lovely glass cages, they appear to have forgotten the outside world, lost in daydreams or household chores. Little sketches of lives play out by themselves beneath our voyeuristic gaze. These singular visions place themselves somewhere between the hyperrealist canvases of Edward Hopper, Alfred Hitchcock’s Rear Window, and Jeff Wall’s photographic tableaux.
Floriane, a native of France, came to New York to study at the International Center of Photography in 2003. Right away, she became fascinated by the beauty of the nighttime lights in the city that never sleeps, and by the proximity created by so many tall buildings so close together. The idea of posing subjects followed soon after, though it added its share of complications: “Contrary to appearances, the images in my pictures are never superimposed. I like to play with this ambiguity, but everything is there in the moment the shot is taken, which demands a lot of preparation.” A kind of teamwork that draws as much from film as from traditional photography, even if certain pictures turn out to be “simply” self portraits… Since her first shots of New York, Floriane has traveled with her large format camera to other “key cities” of the 20th century. But in the end, it matters little whether we are in Shanghai, Tokyo, Las Vegas, or Istanbul: “The idea is not to create a set of postcards, but to evoke a universal feeling of solitude…”
Night Views has been shown across the United States, Europe and Russia, and will be published in book form by Nazraeli Press in March 2008.