Look at Me

Every other year the world photography exhibition PHOTOQUAI presented by the Musée du quai Branly scans the work of emerging international contemporary artists who are little known in Europe, and brings them to Paris in an event that, in the words of Stéphane Martin, President, musée du quai Branly, hopes to “prove a revelation of fresh interchanges and points of view on the world”.

PHOTOQUAI, the World Photography Biennale is an open air exhibition that takes place along the banks of the Seine and in the museum gardens of the Musée du quai Branly, coordinator of the event, giving visitors the chance to discover the world of non-Western photography. Under the heading «Look at me», the entire programme of this edition is a tribute to the human figure.

The artistic director of this fourth edition is artist Frank Kalero, globetrotter and passionate lover of photography, who worked with a team of  eight main curators, who are all iconic figures in their own part of the world . They select the work of contemporary photographers from all around the world, unpublished talent or those who are little known in Europe and who come from the far-flung corners of the world: Central and South America, Asia, Oceania, Africa, the Near and Middle East, Russia etc.

The selection of over 400 works by 40 photographers from the non-Western world (29 countries from the 5 continents are represented) reflects the diversity of ways of viewing the non-European world today, from the interior, as practiced by the artists who live there. This is a far cry from the clichés frequently propagated by certain tourist photography. The focus here is not on reflecting photographic production from a large number of countries but on highlighting artists and their own works, making no claims to exhaustiveness in terms of geographical coverage.