Photographer captures in images children’s games around the world

For more than a decade, Nancy Richards Farese has traveled to capture cute images of children from all over the world, from Burkina Faso to Honduras, from Ethiopia to Spain.

In her travels, the American photographer observed a common thread that seems to transcend cultures. “They play,” Farese said, on a video call from Boston, “despite what’s going on around them.”

Perhaps there is no better portrayal of this than the images of Farese taken in the sprawling refugee camp in Cox’s Bazar, Bangladesh, home to hundreds of thousands of people displaced by the crisis of Myanmar’s Rohingya people.

In the midst of difficulties, she documented children blowing weather vanes and pulling water bottles into makeshift toys, complete with wheels and an old rope.

“We go there to photograph all this trauma and difficulties, and still notice that children slide down a hill of mud; they create amazing and elaborate games with bottle caps and shoes; or they still make kites and trucks from abandoned bottles and old cassette tapes”, he said.

“The other adults and I had an idea about the seriousness of the situation in that place, and yet the children did something very naturally to help them get through the situation.”

Farese’s new book brings together nearly 100 photographs of children’s play in 14 countries. The characters in the photos play chess in Jordan and “Banco Imobiliário” in Cuba; they jump, turn and run without worry; hit a ball, climb walls and jump ropes. Dolls and kites are recurring features; pebble and hoops tossing games are apparently global – albeit with different names and paraphernalia.