Room in Europe

Anne Noble, one of New Zealand’s most respected photographers, began the European tour of her provocative exhibition Ruby’s Room in Paris at the Musée du quai Branly in January. Part of the museum’s inaugural visual arts biennale PHOTOQUAI, Ruby’s Room is a series of large scale images which challenge conventional portraiture of childhood. Noble shot the series of digital prints of her daughter’s mouth, and what Ruby does with it, as “an alternative archaeology of childhood”. The museum describes the collection of 40 images as “deliberately disproportionate compared with the apparent banality of the subject … highlighting details of the mouth in a rather unusual manner.”