Afghan photographer Fardin Waezi being photographed in front of his work in Paris at the second PhotoQuai biennale.

British Journal of Photography is at the launch of PhotoQuai, the two-month festival of photography at the musee du quai Branly.

The highlight of the festival is the PhotoQuai itself, which collects together 50 photographers from all over the non-Western world (including New Zealand and South Africa) and exhibits large prints of their work outside, by the river Seine. The exhibition was curated by Iranian gallerist Anahita Ghabaian Etehadieh, who selected works from a much larger long list of photographers put together by an international team with contacts on the ground. This ensures that the exhibition features some real surprises as well as those photographers and photographs already well known on the international scene. The only stipulation is that the photographers must not have exhibited in the UK before.

Ghabaian Etehadieh told BJP: 'We tried to find interesting art photography, it didn't matter which country it came from,' and highlights include Hiromi Tsuchida's images of Japanese streets and parks, Ilan Godfrey's South African series Living with Crime, and Mexican photographer Jeronimo Arteaga's shots of the San Luis Potosi desert region. The image above shows Afghan photographer Fardin Waezi with his work, a project celebrating the rebirth of amateur photography in Kabul. Waezi, who learned photography in his father's studio and studied under Reza Deghati, teaches at the Aina Photo School as well as shooting photojournalism for the Aina Photo Agency, the United Nations in Afghanistan and the international wires.

The biennale includes two other shows too; an exhibition of Iranian photography inside the musee du quai Branly, and a series of images taken from the museum's extensive photography archive, on show next to indigenous art at the Louvre. Space has also been made for last year's Artistic Creation Project winners, who were given the support to create new work - Mexican photographer Lourdes Grobet, Congolese photographer Sammy Baloji and Chinese photographer Wu Qi. The winners of the 2009 award, Indian photographer Pablo Bartholomew and Taiwanese photographer Wayne Liu showed their work-in-progress.

The award demonstrates the museum's ongoing commitment to photography - it also exhibits, commissions and acquires contemporary photography. 'Contemporary photography was an obvious place for us to focus some of our grants and funds,' said director of the musee du quai Branly Stephane Martin. 'We have a good curator, we wanted to focus on contemporary art, it's not too expensive and its accesible. Plus we have a large archive [of photography and other artifacts]. If you don't add to your archive it becomes something dead, although still very precious.'

In total, the museum has an annual budget of €60m, of which it spends €2m per year on acquisitions alone. This year it also spent €1m on PhotoQuai.