“It’s all just girls, girls, girls playing politics,” » « Vincent van Gogh’s Dead Grasshopper.

Amos Chapple.

Absolutely stunning photography, many photos with their own stories, too. Just a few here, although I’d happily post each and every one of them!

An illegal tusk hunter at a site where men extract mammoth tusks from the permafrost. Click here for my story on the Mammoth Pirates of Siberia.

For 61 years he’s sat here, legs dwindling to sticks as he thumps cooking pots into shape. His sons work beside him, three hammer blows occasionally falling together in synch, then scattering again into the random beat of the workshop.

I ask whether the girls admired his arms when he was young but he scolds me for rudeness. He’s more comfortable talking about the men with firebombs who drove his family out of their homeland. His father had made the decision to stay when Pakistan was formed around them, a Sikh clan in a new Muslim nation, but eventually the mob violence visited their neighbourhood and they fled.

Like so many who’ve lived through big history he’s nostalgic for the past. “Under the British we felt enormous pressure but we were innocent then. Now the people have freedom but we no longer love each other.”

But his old-testament face lights up when his grandchildren appear, they’re educated and will live a different life. He props a favourite onto his knee, “these little ones can choose their own lives and of course I’m happy for that”.

Finally, after the curious crowd have drifted away from us he leans in close, “you asked about my arms? My wife told me she always felt safe in these arms”. He rocks back and sweeps a hand over his children, his workshop, his little empire, “and she was, she always was”

These and so very much more can be seen at Amos Chapple Photography. Have a wander! And you won’t want to miss his feature on The Shepherds of the Tusheti Mountains, a gorgeous pictorial of a dangerous job:

Every autumn, a spectacular animal migration takes place in Georgia’s Tusheti region in the northern Caucasus Mountains. Radio Free Europe photographer Amos Chapple recently joined a group of shepherds and their dogs on what he refers to as a “deadly, boozy journey” from the steep mountains to the plains, as they brought their 1,200 sheep down to their winter pastures.

All images © Amos Chapple.

“It’s all just girls, girls, girls playing politics,” » « Vincent van Gogh’s Dead Grasshopper.

Comments

  1. rq says

    I fell in love with the pictures from Georgia, esp. the one of sheep along the lake, but they’re all stunningly breathtaking. Now there is one more thing I want to do in this life: make that hike with the shepherds. The world is so beautiful and it’s a shame people have to make such an ugly mess of it.

  2. rq says

    I wonder how long people have been bringing sheep over that pass, how many generations, what other history hides along that trail, what ghosts wander. But I especially empathized with the group leader -- wanted to be away from people.

  4. says

    rq:

    But I especially empathized with the group leader — wanted to be away from people.

    I did too. If I had been in his place, I might well have done the same thing.

  5. says

    rq:

    And the story about arms, the story just touches the heart.

    And how! I loved how he just had to answer the question about his arms.

  8. rq says

    The line of sheep become a defining feature of many photographs, a natural fit but distinctive due to colour, but also adding tension because sometimes they’re such a thin thread.

  9. Ice Swimmer says

    Wonderful pictures. The clouds on the mountains, sheep and rivers forming an inverted A and many others.

  11. rq says

    He seems to catch these moments between -- like, early mornings or evenings, before or after major people traffic. The overlooked parts, extreme corners, the edges. It’s quite fascinating because I feel like I’m seeing things out of the ordinary frame of time, and there’s a huge sense of expectation in most photos, a bit like that final moment right before stepping out onto the stage. Rather unsettling.
    I keep going on in the comments here, sorry. But for some reason these photos have really resonated with me, and I don’t know if it’s the season, the weather, or just life right now.

  12. says

    I think it’s that he catches the every day, it’s just that those days belong to other people, in parts of the world we aren’t familiar with. I spent a long time on the first photo on the air page:

    They hand-paddle out to the lily pads. Wife, husband and uncle, feeling the tendrils beneath for the little nodules which will earn them enough to put “two meals on the table and a little bit”.

    Roasted, the water chestnuts will end up in sooty piles at the market. Fingers blacken breaking through to the white flesh within. The flavour is somewhere between a peanut and a potato, watery and crisp.

    “We’re a fisherman caste, there’s no ‘like’ or ‘dislike’ to working in the water. Does a fish like to swim? We do what our people have always done.”

    “If someone told us to do this job we would never agree. The work is never-ending and the business is tiny, but it’s ours and that’s a joy. Better to be your own slave than someone else’s.” Jhalawar, India.

    That’s a glimpse into a life I would never normally have, and it makes me reflect on a lot of things. Life.

  13. rq says

    it’s that he catches the every day, it’s just that those days belong to other people

    That’s a really neat way of putting it. The rain story has that same feel, too:

    Full-time labourer, part-time butcher Winchester Lyngkhoi carries fresh meat up to his stall on market day.
    “Is it hard to live with so much rain?”
    “We can’t think about that. Here there’s always rain but we have to work, so it’s no good wondering.

    It’s like we spend our lives trying to change things around us to fit, and yet there’s a pointlessness to it that these people see -- an acceptance and a joy in a life that they didn’t choose but that they are and that they do well and also because it must be done.

    Those Mammoth Pirates of Siberia, though.

  15. says

    rq:

    It’s like we spend our lives trying to change things around us to fit, and yet there’s a pointlessness to it that these people see — an acceptance and a joy in a life that they didn’t choose but that they are and that they do well and also because it must be done.

    All that. And I think a lot of us have a whole lot of luxury in life we take for granted. I certainly do.

  16. rq says

    And I think a lot of us have a whole lot of luxury in life we take for granted. I certainly do.

    Same.

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