Floriane de Lassee, Paris

For several years now, photographer Floriane de Lassee 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 a provocative fusion. de Lassee, a native of France, came to New York to study at the International Center of Photography in 2003. She became fascinated by the beauty of the night lights in the city that never sleeps, and by the proximity created by having 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. The idea is not to create a set of postcards, but to evoke a universal feeling of solitude.’