These photographs come from the Light On series that Franck Bohbot produced between 2013 and 2014 in New York. The artist captured the lights and colours that illuminate the nocturnal cityscape thanks to the lighting from the myriad storefronts of grocery stores, restaurants, apartment buildings, or fair grounds. While they conserve their activity, the latter become gradually devoid of people as the night goes on, thus giving way to a ?second life?, a calmer and more laidback one. Like the photographs of Robert Frank, particularly those of Detroit and New York, Franck Bohbot succeeds in revealing another side to America, through urban scenes and portraits of Americans taken in the course of their daily life. His various views, each taken with a long exposure time, give a highly contrasted and dynamic effect to the compositions, which highlight the various kinds of architecture he encounters. They also confer a deliberately cinematographic character to his shots, bearing witness to the photographer?s fascination for architecture and its importance in films.

**The artist: Franck Bohbot**

Born in 1980 in the Parisian region, Franck Bohbot lives and works in New York. He began his career as a set photographer, producing a number of photographic series dedicated to urban architecture, from 2008 onwards. His subjects include theatres, libraries, fair grounds, and swimming pools. While Bernd and Hilla Becher dedicate their works to the frontal photography of industrial installations, the French photographer develops a protocol with the same precision that allows him to draw up an inventory of Parisian public, cultural, or sporting sites, devoid of any human presence. The artist adopts a frontal point of view each time, highlighting an almost perfect symmetry. The photographer's outsider's eye thus lends the sites a new dimension: one that is more monumental and stylised. These places are transformed into unique and captivating spaces, both in terms of their historical and sociological aspects, as well as aesthetic concerns. This ability to observe architecture in an original manner has earned him some major commissions by prestigious institutions such as the Louvre.