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Bearing witness

Michael Coyne is a man in a hurry: the photographer has embarked on a project to capture the life and customs in villages around the world before globalisation sweeps them all away.

Citing figures from a recent UN report, Coyne says more than half of the world's population live in cities and he wants to document village life before it is gone. Some of his photographic records are displayed in Hearing the Grass Grow - Village Life, which opens at the Fringe Club this week as part of its City Festival.

'I've been working on it for a long time because I realised villages were starting to disappear,' Coyne says of the project that he initiated three years ago.

'Villages are changing - everything is becoming a monoculture. And so they're losing a lot of their old customs, a lot of their old ideas. The kids want to become modern. As soon as electricity comes on they want phones, they want MTV.'

One of the consequences of these changes, including the flight of the younger generation to cities, is that now Coyne encounters many villages where there are only young children and the grandparents looking after them.

His black-and-white images capture the calm and sometimes forlorn ordinariness of village life.

'[This project is] about listening to what's going on in the villages ... It's so quiet, it's just really wonderful and you have to lie there and listen to what's going on - the stillness of it.'

The 63-year-old regards himself as a documentary photographer, having made a career as an observer of both the tragic and mundane facets of human existence. His energy is tangible in a body of work that spans several decades, continents and pivotal events in recent history, including the 1979 Iranian revolution and the Rwandan genocide.

It has not always been just about getting the right image. Coyne recalls that he was once allowed to document the trial of a drug dealer who was found guilty of murdering his business partner in Tehran.

'When they offered to hang the man at the murder trial for me, the judge said, 'Look, he's guilty, we're going to hang him. What time would the light be right for the picture?'

'[The judge] was trying to be obliging. The man was a criminal. There was no question about it. There was no question he had committed a murder and a violent murder. But that doesn't give me the right to make the decision about how long he lives. Because if I had said, well, the light is fabulous in the morning, let's hang him in the morning, that means I've taken a day away from that man's life.'

Coyne recently completed a doctorate at Griffith University in Australia based on his life's work and focusing on the ethical dilemmas of what he does as a documentary photographer.

'You are looking for some kind of truth. But truth only as you can see it, only as you can present it. And that's all you can do,' says Coyne.

'I'm a visual anthropologist: I seek out whatever the subject is and try to see it as openly as I can. I try to go to these projects openly. You always carry baggage from whatever you are - you can't help that - but I try to go to these things as openly as I can to let them tell me.'

Coyne started working as a photographer at a newspaper in Australia, then at magazines, and eventually had his own studio where he was shooting cookbooks. After one particularly frustrating week trying to photograph the perfect ice cream cone, a friend invited him to give a photo workshop in the Philippines. It turned out to be for some people fighting against the Marcos regime.

'I met a young man who invited me to come back to his part of the country, which was in Mindanao. He happened to be one of the most wanted men in the Philippines because he was a member of the MNLF [Moro National Liberation Front],' says Coyne.

'I stayed with the MNLF and became very friendly; went back and forth many times, documented their struggles and through them became involved with the Islamic world worldwide.'

He has since worked for a long list of publications as well as produced several books, picking up awards along the way, but he is perhaps best known for his eye-opening documentation of the early days of the Iranian revolution. The message of Coyne's work is always to find the humanity.

Coyne is grateful for his wife's support, especially during the eight years he spent going in and out of Iran. 'If it wasn't for my wife I couldn't do my kind of work. She encourages me to go and shoot the kinds of subjects that I cover and she supports me 100 per cent.

'Even if I am going somewhere that is dangerous, she knows that I would only be doing it if I thought it was necessary.'

But making a career of witnessing the brutality of life does take a toll. 'It's terrible to see people in these circumstances,' says Coyne.

'When you see people in absolute poverty or struggling under bombs or whatever ... It's still there. I'm not that cynical yet. It still affects me just as much. And I go home and I carry it with me.'

Hearing the Grass Grow - Village Life, from Jan 8 to 24. Free admission. Michael Coyne will give a talk, On Becoming a Working Photographer, Saturday, 6.30pm at the Roof Garden, Fringe Club, HK$180. Inquiries: 2521 7251

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