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.