People in Changing Places: Images from Urbanising Asia
Richard Friend

• Throughout the Festival
• Free admission
  No booking required
• Fossgate cafes, restaurants and shops (map)
• Not fully wheelchair accessible

Event details

 
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Join us for a photographic exhibition of the work of Richard Friend, who presents a series of images from across Thailand, Cambodia, India, Indonesia, Nepal, Vietnam and Myanmar. Featuring different interwoven stories, the exhibition addresses a common theme of people in the face of rapid change. 

Asia is going through a period of dramatic social and environmental change, most evident in the pace and intensity of urbanisation. This is creating all kinds of challenges as people try to find their place in a new urban landscape, displaying tensions between tradition and modernity, and creating new sets of risks and vulnerabilities, from flooding to pollution, and through the everyday struggles to sustain livelihoods and communities.

Stories covered in the exhibition include slum Thai boxing children, local market and gentrification, risk and vulnerability, religious practice in the modern city, claiming public space and Chinese medicine.

About the speaker

Richard Friend’s photography provides an insight into the tensions between modernity and tradition, and the dramatic social and environmental changes across Asia – particularly Thailand, Cambodia, Laos and Vietnam – and more recently in India, Nepal and Myanmar.

Richard combines photography with his background in anthropology. He is a Lecturer in the University of York’s Environment Department and a member of the University of York International Development Network.

After completing a doctorate based on extensive ethnographic fieldwork in Southern Thailand, Richard spent many years as a development practitioner leading social development and conservation programmes, and policy-orientated research, photographing extensively and publishing widely in research journals, books and reports – as well as more accessible blog and Op-Ed articles.