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Photo Stories
ALL IMAGES © AMOS CHAPPLE / RFE / RL
S
urprisingly for a New Zealander,
photographer Amos Chapple likes the
cold. He has photographed Siberia’s
Ice Highway and Oymyakon, the
coldest town on Earth in east Siberia where, in
1933, temperatures bombed to minus -90°F.
Perhaps even more surprisingly, he doesn’t
particularly like his homeland. ‘I left New
Zealand for the fi rst time and went to Russia
aged 23, 24. New Zealand is not a pleasant
place, it’s socially oppressive somehow. In Russia
no-one knew who I was or cared. I loved it
there, I felt at home, I felt free.’
Continuing on the cold front, for his recent
reportage, Forty Days Of Darkness, Prague-
based Amos purchased a new iPhone 11 Pro
and travelled to Murmansk, Russia – the
biggest city inside the Arctic Circle. From
December until January the sun never rises.
With the iPhone almost exclusively in night
mode, he shot life in the darkness for eight
days, which equates to 16 as Amos explains,
‘Usually you have just a few hours of soft light
in the morning and evening, you have to work
around that. When you’re shooting a city that is
always dark, time is irrelevant. I can get out of
bed at 1am or 1pm and it’s going to look the
same. I was really able to hammer away at the
assignment pretty much non-stop.’Life changing
Amos found shooting with the phone life-
changing, so will he return to using a ‘proper’
camera? ‘When I walk out the door to take a
walk with my wife, I never take my camera with
me any more, I already have a great camera in
my pocket. I recently did a shoot in Armenia,
three nights at a Soviet-era cosmic-ray
research station 3,100 metres above sea level.
When shooting that story, I would mainly use
my main camera, a Panasonic GX9, but there
were a couple of situations and photographs
that will end up being in the published story
that I shot with the phone. The reason that it
was so useful is because it’s so discreet and
even if you are noticed, people don’t care –
that action does not look consequential
whereas if you pick up your camera, people
think why is he doing that, where is this going?
‘Another cool thing about the phone, when
I’m shooting with a Micro Four Thirds camera
in cold places, I’ll have my main camera outsidestuffed slightly into my jacket to preserve it
from the cold a little bit. I’ll then have a camera
literally stuffed down my pants, to keep it warm
so if I step inside somewhere, I can pull out the
warm camera and start shooting immediately;
otherwise you’re without a camera for more
than an hour until it warms up again. There is a
transition period with a phone from shooting
outside to shooting in the warm but it’s a
matter of minutes rather than hours.’Atmospheric
The photographs from Murmansk show us
tsarist-era boats frozen in moonlight, the
Northern Lights rippling above a cemetery and
shoppers going about their business in
blizzards. They take us inside nightclubs and
introduce us to locals in the church, fi ring
range and bars. In one image, a shopkeeper
fi lls large plastic bottles with beer, a weekend
supply for a customer and his wife. Does Amos
partake in a wintry tipple on assignment?
‘There were situations in Murmansk where, if I
was not knocking back beers with the local
people, there is no way they would let me take
the pictures I was taking. They’re comfortable
with me, I’m comfortable with them. Why
would you exclude that advantage – when you
start drinking with people, they let their guard
down, you leave your guard down, cool
situations happen. You want to be sharing the
life of these people as best you can, everyone
knows it’s supremely rude to turn down a
drink, especially in Russia!’
The Murmansk series is part of an impressive
portfolio of assignments that include shooting
35 Unesco World Heritage Sites and a
remarkable reportage, The Mammoth Pirates
of Siberia. How does he fi nd stories and keep
inspired? ‘The biggest advantage I have is that
I’m going places and when you go places you
fi nd stories you would never fi nd. With the
mammoth hunters, I saw a blog post about ice
road truckers, so I went with some guys about
to go out on the road – the scariest story of my
life. Because we shared these very intense
situations we bonded and they said if I think
what they do in winter is interesting, I should
see their jobs in summer. One of those jobs
was mammoth-tooth hunting.’ There’s no
excuse not to go out and photograph,
especially if it looks cold.Aft er sunset
From December to January, the sun never rises
in Murmansk, Russia. Peter Dench chats to the
photographer Amos Chapple about his time there