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.

The Iranian Revolution, image © Kaveh Golestan, on show at the exhibition 165 years of Iranian photography at the musee du quai Branly, Paris.

The musee du quai Branly has put Iranian photography under the spotlight in one of its PhotoQuai exhibitions, with a show celebrating 165 years of work. The exhibition is curated by Bahman Sarbakhshian and Bahman Jalali, under the creative directorship of Iranian gallerist and this year's PhotoQuai curator Anahita Ghabaian Etehadieh, and it gives a brief outline of early photography in the country before turning its attention to photography during and after the 1979 revolution.

'We wanted to show that Iranians have a long tradition of photography, and that it's a different history to that of, for example, France,' Ghabaian Etehadieh told BJP. Photography in Iran really blossomed in the 1920-1960s then almost stopped, until the revolution - it was an important part of the revolution and beyond. Now is another big time for Iranian photographers, because they now have access to the internet, and can see images from elsewhere. The level of photography now is higher.'

The exhibition includes early shots of eroticised 'Persian femmes' by Antoine Sevnegin as well as striking shots of the chaos of the revolution, shot by photojournalists such as Bahman Jalagi and Kaveh Golestan, as well as contemporary work by photographers such as Sadegh Tirafken, Vahid Salerni and Arash Kamooshi. Tirafken's images mix composite headshots with traditional carpets to suggest the multitudes which comprise Iranian society, while Salerni provides a refreshing take on an often-photographed country by showing shots of football matches. Kamooshi, meanwhile, shows a funny, poignant and, finally, sinister scenario - the police confiscation of a set of domestic satellite images. 'One of the questions we ask in the exhibition is whether there is a school of Iranian photography,' said Ghabaian Etehadieh. 'I think maybe there isn't yet - but there will be later.'

The exhibition is on show until 22 November, which means it's also up when Paris Photo comes to town (19-22 November), with the same Iranian theme. Other institutions picking up the baton include Monnaie de Paris, with an exhibition of 30 years of documentary photography from the revolution to the present day (06 November – 20 December) and HSBC France, which has a short exhibition entitled Chroniques Iraniennes (Iranian stories,16-27 November). Paris Photo itself, meanwhile, will include an exhibition of Iranian and Arab photography curated by Catherine David including images by up-and-coming photographers presented by two Tehran galleries - Mohammed Ghazali and Sadegh Tirafkan (presented by Assart Art) and Bahman Jalali, Katayoun Karami and Gohar Dashti (presented by Silk Road - Ghabaian Etehadieh's gallery).

And there are rich pickings outside Paris too. Iran Unbowed, at The Churchill Hyatt Regency London, 10-24 October, will show work by established artists such as Abbas Kiarostami and Farideh Lashai as well as Hossein Cheraghchi and Rasool Soltani, who are previously unexibited outside of Iran. Photojournalist David Burnett’s images of the Iranian revolution, meanwhile, were recently exhibited at Visa Pour l’Image and have been published as a book by National Geographic.

Henri Cartier-Bresson's shot of two Mexican women makes an unusual match with a piece of sculpture from Haiti, part of the PhotoQuai biennale of world photography. Image copyright musee du quai Branly, photograph Antoine Schneck.

PhotoQuai, the musee du quai Branly’s festival of world photography, includes an usual exhibition in the Pavillon des Sessions at the Louvre. Portrait croises pairs a selection of 40 images from the musee du quai Branly’s extensive archive with indigenous sculptures and artworks from around the world.

The connections between the images and objects were left deliberately vague by the curator behind the installations, Yves Le Fur, director of the heritage and collections department at the muse du quai Branly at the Louvre. ‘I didn’t want the images to be used as illustration,’ he explains. ‘They have a discrete presence. So I kept the correspondences deliberately unsystematic, leaving it to the viewer to unravel.’

Henri Cartier-Bresson’s 1934 shot of two women in Mexico, for example, is paired with a piece of sculpture from Haiti, one of the Louvre’s many pieces of art from the area. The correspondence, in this case, is between the women’s poses, their upturned, bleak expressions, and the shape and form of the sculpture. It’s a novel, unexpected approach which, as Le Fur says, becomes almost like a game for the viewer. ‘Often there is no logical link between the two, so the viewers see the picture and the object and have to question it for themselves.’

Le Fur selected the images for the exhibition with Christine Barthe, curator for photography at the musee du quai Branly since 2004. They deliberately picked out portraits, says Barthe, in the belief they would appeal to the general public to relate. ‘The general public isn’t well informed about photography or indigenous art and we wanted them to feel free to come,’ she says. ‘Plus the Louvre now presents indigenous art pieces as masterpieces in their own right, so we needed very strong images to match up to that.’

The museum’s collection of images dates back to the 1820s, and includes shots by Claude Levi-Strauss and Pierre Verger as well as Cartier-Bresson and numerous anonymous photographers. It was originally held by the Natural History Museum then, as attitudes towards colonialism and non-Western cultures shifted, moved to the Musee de l’Homme. This ethnographic institution decided to make the collection available as documents to scholars, and added images to it throughout the 1930s and 40s. The collection then declined a little, before being moved to the musee du quai Branly in 1996. The musee du quai Branly is now actively adding to the collection, acquiring existing images from artists and commissioning three or four new works per year.