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.