Michael Coyne

Award-Winning International Photographer & Author

Profile

Michael Coyne has worked as a photographer for over 30 years, covering wars, revolutions, famine, natural disasters and other international events in places as diverse as the Philippines, Papua New Guinea, Cambodia, Indonesia, the Middle East and Africa.

His photographs have featured in numerous prestigious publications including Time, Life, the New York Times, Newsweek and National Geographic. Michael’s extensive work has been featured in a number of solo exhibitions around the world, and is held in collections in Washington, New York, San Francisco, Sydney, Canberra, Melbourne, Hong Kong, London and Rome.

Consistently rated as one of Australia’s very best speakers, Michael’s enlightening and moving presentations, which draw on a unique perspective from three decades as one of the world’s preeminent photojournalists, are full of humanity, insight and humour.

Current Work:

For twenty years Michael has been travelling the world working on a book project: VILLAGE Hearing the Grass Grow, which documents the demise of village life. He has photographed villagers with HIV/AIDS in Thailand, Myanmar and Nepal and landmine victims in Cambodia, boated across the flooded paddy fields of Bangladesh, and documented a typhoon in the Philippines. Michael recorded the lives of village girls working in the sex industry in Pakistan, Thailand, and Hong Kong, and in Pakistan photographed indentured slaves and children working in brick kilns. In China he revealed the lack of safety equipment in a coal-mining village, photographing miners with no protection from coal dust. He has photographed dancing Gauchos on the pampas of Argentina, a prison guard in the Philippines singing karaoke to prisoners while armed with an assault rifle, a traditional healer in Malawi promoting questionable treatments such as his own urine to cure AIDS, and the forcing of Bedouins from their villages in the Jordan Valley, their grazing lands seized by the Israel military for security purposes. Michael also travelled across Russia to Siberia where he spent time with indigenous Nenets reindeer herders.

Previous Experience:

Michael spent eight years in the Middle East documenting the rise of Islamic fundamentalism and covering the Iranian revolution and the Iran/Iraq war, his work receiving a number of awards including from the American National Press Photographers Association and the Overseas Press Club of America.

Author: Michael Coyne’s many successful books include Second Spring – The Regeneration of the Jesuits, Numurkah Lakes & Roses and A World of Australians, and his life and work have been the subject of three documentary films and a play.

Awards: In April 2003 Michael was awarded the Centenary Medal by the Australian Government for service to photography, and in 2007 The Australian Institute of Professional Photography granted him a Fellowship, the highest honour a photographer can receive in Australia.

Education: Michael has a PhD in Documentary Photography from Griffith University, and is a Senior Fellow at PSC.

Expertise

Talking Points
Putting Your Creativity to Work
Capturing the Moment: Motivation, persistence and achievement
International Affairs: A different perspective
Photography Workshops: From beginner to advanced

Media

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