Work Wellington photographer Anne Noble is in a major exhibition as part of the inaugural arts biennale Photoquai 2007 in Paris. The Quai Branly Museum is presenting Noble's highly acclaimed series Ruby's Room as its contemporary contribution to the new biennale, which is focused primarily on photography from artists living outside Europe. Photoquai has been timed to coincide with Paris Photo - the world's premier art fair for photography.

Image: Anne Noble, Ruby's Room #40 (detail)Three new exhibitions at the Quai Branly Museum aim to draw attention to the museum's relationship with photography and its major collection of more than 700,0000 photographs. Noble's exhibition is positioned alongside a show of East African daguerreotypes (an early type of photograph) and photographs of African art taken by Walker Evans, considered the finest American documentary photographer of the twentieth century. The exhibitions run until mid-January.

Noble, who has exhibited widely throughout New Zealand and Australia, has also exhibited in Spain and Germany but this is the first time her work has been seen in France. The Museum's showing of 28 large-scale photographs from Ruby's Room, and production of a 64-page monograph, is major recognition for the New Zealand artist who is in Paris for the opening of the exhibition.

Ruby's Room is a distinctive, original and complicated distillation of childhood. Developed in collaboration with her daughter Ruby between 1998-2007, it challenges conventional depictions of childhood creating a catalogue of the things children do with their mouths. Noble has described her project "an alternative archaeology of childhood".

31/10/07