Twelve Questions: Amos Chapple

Amos Chapple says he has made amazing friends all over the world. Picture / Jason Oxenham.

Almost a decade ago, Auckland photographer Amos Chapple was commissioned to photograph Unesco world heritage sites in 35 cities around the world. Now a freelance photojournalist, he has lived in many of the most remote parts of the planet, and says he found the happiest people on Earth in India.

1. You have an amazing aerial photograph of the Kremlin that was featured on international media sites last year: how did that happen?
I got a commission from a book company to get Red Square and the Kremlin by drone and they said 'if you get the photo Amos, we'd be delighted but if you get caught you're on your own'. It was pretty risky, there are secret service, KGB, guys all around there but I got into this spot and used the traffic noise to hide the drone sound. I had it up for just two or three minutes and got this shot where you can see right inside the Kremlin. Then I brought it down, and while it was still flying shoved it into my case and ran down an alleyway, jumped a fence, dived into the back of this cafe and just downloaded the images to as many places as I could.

2. What led you into photography?
I grew up in a family of journalists (father is writer Geoff Chapple, sister Irene works for CNN) and photography seemed like the best way for me to get into the newsroom. No, I wasn't academic at school at all. Basically my childhood was barefoot and fancy free until school when life got real. We travelled around the South Island at one stage for my dad's work and I remember going to sleep in a bed that was humming with cars passing by out the window. Maybe that's what gave me a taste for the road. I got ushered out of my first primary school and at my second one, popularity seemed to be based on lunchtime fights or wrestling matches. Luckily I was pretty good at those. High school was just weird - we were all white, middle class and everything was kind of sweet in the world so we created our own adversity in our social circles and it became a really awful atmosphere.

3. Was it a bit Lord of the Flies?
A bit. It damaged a lot of people. I'll bump into people from my year now and we'll talk about it. Some never recovered. I was a bit all over the place at school. Didn't really understand why I was there. It's all a bit of a blur. People will say to me now 'remember Amos when the teacher turned around to write on the board and you jumped out the window' and I really can't remember that at all.

4. When did you find your thing?
I was about 15 when I really found photography. I remember getting a picture of my mate jumping this big dangerous drop at school and our two friends were in the tree watching him jump with this look of shock and glee on their faces that he would even try it. That moment was just amazing. Now everyone can do it with digital and slow-mo but then it felt really incredible to be able to freeze that moment forever. At 17 Istarted pestering the Herald for a job.

5. How did the travel begin?
That was a commission funded by Panasonic and assisted by Unesco and the guy knew my dad, knew that I had no house or partner so would just be able to travel. That was about nine years ago. I started in Ireland but the most exciting place in the early days was Russia. I really connected with the people and it felt like I could start afresh as a person. I wasn't the naughty kid from school. I'd been a socially nervous guy but my inhibitions were gone.

6. Do you come up with your own ideas for images now?
Yeah. The Unesco work finished in 2012 so now I come up with ideas and put them into packages which the agencies sell. I spent about six weeks in the coldest place on Earth, a village in Eastern Siberia called Oymyakon where it was about minus 50 degrees. There was a reindeer herder who sleeps outside at night sometimes if the reindeer are spooked by wolves. He just builds a big fire and tucks himself into a little pocket in the snow.

7. Where, in your opinion, are the happiest people on Earth?
That would be the Khasi who live in northeastern India. I spent a lot of time with them. They are devoutly religious, Christian. They have a great communion with the jungle, live in an extremely clean and healthy area. It's a matrilinear culture where the women pass property down to the next generation. Great food.

8. And the most at risk?
That would be anyone in the sphere of influence of Russia. Armenia. Ukraine. I lived in St Petersburg off and on for a couple of years, that's where my girlfriend is, but there is an attitude being engineered through the state-run media in Russia and people have this real hatred of America. You come to Mairangi Bay or somewhere and everyone is all 'good morning, hello' walking along the beach and no one seems to realise how tense the world is right now. It's like something that just happens on TV. I love that.

9. Do you have to tell people you're not American all the time?
Absolutely. During the Iraq war it was pretty full on. I was staying in a village in Kazakhstan and they knew I was coming so had slaughtered a lamb and there were tables of food and these two Muslim elders were saying 'yadda yadda George Bush' and pointing at me. I had a fork and a knife and I held them up trying to explain "New Zealand fork, America knife, different".

10. Does it get lonely, being on the road so much?
It can do, if you're working alone all day then go back to some three star hotel where it's all an empty long corridor. I drank a bit too much for a while there. Even when people are paying my expenses I stay in hostels now where there are people around, people talking. I've made amazing friends all over the world.

11. What have you learned about people from your years of travel?
I think it's that we need a goal and an adversary. That adversary might be poverty but when you're in a country where there is a national goal, like India, where life is hard but everyone is looking to the future and striving together to overcome that adversary, there's an energy and it's exciting to be in that. You go to the manicured suburbs of Holland and there are beautiful cul de sacs and it's very safe but there's that question hanging above everything, 'what next?'. In England, most of the young kids in London just want to be the toughest little thug on the block. In Iran the adversary is changing the government. In Russia, it's the West, though you don't get that feeling of a collective goal or energy in Russia.

12. What brings you most joy?
Getting on a plane after leaving a new country with a trail of goodwill behind you, some new friends, some solid work and thinking that was a month well spent, a job well done.