In her project “Inside Views”, French photographer Floriane de Lassée (born 1977) shows lonely individuals in apartments, offices and balconies across Paris, Shanghai, London, Tokyo and other places – kept away from intimate human contact, walled off by concrete and glass, enclosed within a harsh and suffocating invisible bubble.

Floriane’s intention here is not to dwell on specific cities but to express the general mood of modern urban loneliness – a consequence of so many factors…the dissolution of permanent traditional communities, migration, long hours of work.

“When I was 25, I went to live in NYC to study at the International Center of Photography and I felt pretty alone,” says the photographer. “While looking at the windows of my neighbours, I realised that I was not the only one in that situation and in a megacity like New York, I felt much more on my own than in the small village in France I am originally from.

“I was studying with a large format camera that needed concentration and calm. So I ended up training myself from the rooftop, staging myself, then friends, then neighbours, then unknown inhabitants. I kept looking by the windows, discovering single lives.”

Shot between 2004 and 2011, “Inside Views” takes mise-en-scène into careful consideration. The angle balances views of the foreground and background. Although the events take place at night, there is plenty of light within the photographs – grey, yellow, green, purple, silver. The series is available as a monograph from Nazraeli Press.

In addition to the International Center of Photography in New York, Floriane was educated at Penninghen/ESAG in Paris. From 2012 to 2014, she toured the globe realising “Half the sky” (a women’s project) and “How Much Can You Carry?” (about different weights of life, not only physical weights but also social, psychological or hereditary pressures). In 2016, she worked on “Modern Sati” and “Trucks”, both shot in India.

Images used with permission.