Inside Views – Floriane de Lassée

Inside Views has been shown across the United States, Europe and Russia, and first edition (sold out) has been published in book form by Nazraeli Press in 2008. 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. At night, these facades become mirrors where incandescent fires are reflected while, in some places, from one floor to another, windows open onto the intimacy of interiors then revealed.

In these times of lockdown,Inside Views takes all the more sense. Looking through the window, observing the daily life and its lot of neighbors, for lack of being able to go outside, represents a real actuality…

Everywhere the city extends its territory, nibbling little by little at the space. Everywhere the lines are stretching more and more towards the sky, like this tower of more than 1000 meters under construction in Jeddah. The boldness of the architects has always echoed the utopian imagination of the builders.
The city has always represented the quintessence of modern life. Everywhere, uniformity is making its way, echoing this galloping urbanization, making us lose our bearings.
Today, more than one in two of the world’s inhabitants is an urban dweller, and about 2.5 billion people could be added to urban areas by mid-century due to climate change and global population growth.

However, we have never questioned so much the meaning of our lives in the city. Each one questions the validity of living far from Nature, and claims a contrario his desire to live far from the noise and the fury, to better listen to the interior silence.
Floriane de Lassée recounts these isolated destinies that only she has been able to perceive behind the secrecy of the windows where they seem to be wrapped in a halo of mystery. Fictional characters or tangible beings momentarily extracted from their reality, these silhouettes, often feminine, are like presences-absences ready to disappear if one looks at them. Are we then voyeurs? Simple witnesses? No, nothing like that…

Confined in our interior spaces, forced to immobility, we are led withInside Views to a mise en abîme of our own anxieties, the glance turned towards the outside, in search of the outside where all is possible, but protected in the cocoon of our apartments, in height, mute, far from the chaos.
Thus, each “view” is a story in itself where one can project oneself until the night fades and its lights disappear. “The night I lie”, sang Alain Bashung…