The photographer who takes a child's’ play very seriously

Nancy Richards Farese has been photographing children all around the world for almost a decade, from Burkina Faso to Honduras, Ethiopia to Spain. Throughout her travels, the American photographer has seen a common quality that appears to cross cultures: "They play," she remarked on a video call from Boston, "regardless of what's going on."

Farese's photographs from the huge refugee camp in Cox's Bazar, Bangladesh, which is home to hundreds of thousands of people displaced by Myanmar's Rohingya conflict, are possibly the best example of this. Despite the difficulties, she photographed toddlers spinning pinwheels and hauling a water jug as a makeshift toy with wheels and an old rope.

"You go there to photograph all this trauma and difficulty, and yet you realize, 'Oh, the kids are sliding down a mud hill; they've created these amazing, elaborate games with bottle tops and shoes; or they've made kites or trucks out of found bottles and old cassette tapes'" she said. "The other adults and I had a mindset about the seriousness of this (situation), and yet the kids were actually doing something, quite naturally, to help them themselves heal.”

Farese's new book collects nearly 100 photographs she took while traveling to 14 different countries to study children's play. Her young subjects play chess in Jordan and monopoly in Cuba; they jump, flip, and run recklessly; they kick and hurl balls, climb and skip ropes. Dolls and kites appear frequently, and games like jacks and toss appear to be universal – albeit with various names and paraphernalia.

"One of the more ubiquitous games is one that, in Haiti, they called 'cercle,'" she said. "It's where they roll a tire and then use a wire to control it. You see it ubiquitously in Ethiopia and Bangladesh. I've tried to do it, just picking it up and running along the road with kids. It's super hard, but it's also really fun. Immediately, you have to really concentrate, you're laughing and there's a competitiveness to it.”

Here are are some of the pictures take a look: