This article analyses the complex dynamics between the human body and the urban environment in the work of French photographer Valérie Jouve. Focussing on a number of works drawn from the series Les Personnages and Les Façades, I propose the notion of containment to be crucial to the study of Jouve's urban portraits. I first approach it as a matter of containment of the human body by the civic and architectural structures of the city, arguing that Jouve renders visible the usually hidden mechanisms of such containment. This leads me to consider the question of boundaries and the relationship of the urban centre to its periphery, which, in the context of France, is bound up with narratives of social stratification. In the final part of the article I consider Jouve's photography as the space of representation, contained by the photographic frame, with theoretical discourse on the tableau providing the main analytical framework.