It took 20 years for this exhibition to see the light of day. Between an aborted first meeting—an email never received—and a recent, almost romantic reunion. This happy coincidence gives the exhibition its title: “20 Years Later…,” presented at Galerie H in Paris. A selective, almost intimate retrospective, which looks back on two decades of photography, combining staging, social poetry, and exploration of the feminine.
The exhibition begins with the founding series: “Inside Views.” It features major cities like New York, Shanghai, Tokyo, Las Vegas, and Istanbul, photographed with a large-format view camera. The approach is frontal, but there’s nothing documentary here. The images confront the geometric immensity of megacities with female silhouettes, enclosed in their apartments like luminous aquariums. They daydream, cook, stretch, turn their backs on us, or ignore us. Floriane de Lassée constructs a mise en abyme: the city outside, the theater inside. A frozen, suspended theater, where female bodies become metaphors for a partitioned world. The infinitely large facing the infinitely intimate.
Then come more recent series, but just as narrative. In “When Water Rises”, photographed on the island of Tanna in Vanuatu, the photographer confronts nature and threats: rising waters, black sand, the Yasur volcano, unpredictable waves… Humans appear small, floating between two opposing forces. This series, inspired by the elements, blends beauty and anxiety, spectacular landscapes and muted vulnerability. Through her images, Floriane de Lassée reminds us that the earth rumbles, and that balance is precarious.
With “Pour Autrui,” her focus turns to medically assisted procreation. A rare series on a subject still underrepresented in contemporary art, the photographer approaches it with modesty and visual invention. Through visual metaphors—seeds, light bulbs, fragmented bodies—she questions how our era is reinventing the desire for children, and the tools to achieve it. Here again, the narrative is effortless: a visual elegance carried by a rigorous image construction, inherited from her training in art direction at ESAG and her time at the International Center of Photography in New York.
The more recent “Awakening” evokes a cinematic imagination, inspired by the film Indochina. Two children discover a natural and sensory world. A gentle, almost idyllic interlude, far from the tense urbanity of the beginnings. And with “Bâoli,” the photographer pays homage to the sacred stepwells of India, abandoned but magnificent, which she isolates from their context to reveal their silent geometry. A nod to Escher, but above all an act of preservation: preserving through images what progress has forgotten.
With this exhibition, Floriane de Lassée constructs a sensitive puzzle, where each series interacts with the others. A coherent work that blends femininity, architecture, symbols, and suspended gazes.
“20 Years Later…” , by Floriane de Lassée, is on view at Galerie H in Paris, until July 18, 2025.
