Carol Teepa with her youngest grandchild, Mia, and son, Wanea, in Rūātoki - part of an award-winning series featured in the 2025 World Press Photo Exhibition. Photo / Tatsiana Chypsanava, NZ Geographic
More than 17,000km separate Tatsiana Chypsanava’s home country of Belarus and Te Urewera, one of the world’s most remote rainforests, deep in the central North Island.
Yet the relationship she’s built with the Tūhoe people and their ancestral land has brought the Nelson-based photographer closer to her own cultural identity than ever before.
A descendant of the Komi people of northwestern Russia, Chypsanava was born in Belarus, where acknowledging indigenous heritage was actively discouraged.
After moving to New Zealand, she began a 10-year documentary project in Te Urewera, capturing images of daily life.
Chypsanava’s aim was to offer a more authentic perspective on Tūhoe than the images of conflict and hardship she’d often seen depicted in the media.
As she spent more time in the community, she became increasingly aware of how colonisation had impacted the Soviet Union’s indigenous populations in a similar way.
“I knew we came from the Komi people because my surname is in the Komi language, although I had to learn Belarusian at primary school,” she says. “We were cut off from that family history.
“There were so many parallels. At the same time as I was learning about Tūhoe, I was also learning about myself. It became a journey of self-discovery for me.”
A series of Chypsanava’s images, titled Te Urewera – The Living Ancestor of Tūhoe People, won the Asia-Pacific and Oceania region’s long-term project category in this year’s World Press Photo Contest.
The jury described her entry as “a powerful, detailed look at the Ngāi Tūhoe people’s fight for the return of their ancestral lands and indigenous rights”.
First held in 1955, the prestigious annual awards recognise the world’s best photojournalism and documentary photography, culminating in a touring exhibition that opens in Auckland next Saturday.
Alongside this year’s 42 international winners, a selection of images from the archives will also be on display to mark the contest’s 70th anniversary.
Chypsanava came to New Zealand in 2008 after spending three years in Brazil, where as an amateur photographer she documented the indigenous Tupinamba people who live in an isolated rainforest community.
While working for the digitisation team at Archives New Zealand, she met a group of Tūhoe researchers preparing for a settlement hearing.
Learning of the 2007 Urewera raids conducted as part of an anti-terrorist operation, and the “state-sanctioned violence” that accompanied them, shocked her. (Police Commissioner Mike Bush later formally apologised for the way the raids were handled.)
“A police raid is something that I would imagine happening in a dictatorship, like the country I come from, so that resonated with me,” she says.
“I was in disbelief that this was happening in New Zealand, which was portrayed to the world as a perfect country with a perfect relationship with its indigenous people.”
When one of the families was raided again, by mistake, in 2014, Chypsanava was invited to Rūātoki to photograph them. Over the next decade, she and her daughter were welcomed into the Teepa whānau, which forms the heart of her Tūhoe series.
John Rangikapua Teepa and his wife, Carol, are parents to six children and have whāngai adopted and raised many more. After returning to John’s ancestral farm, which had been abandoned, they’re now part of an award-winning organic dairy co-operative managed by the Tataiwhetu Trust.
Soon, Chypsanava began spending all her daughter’s school holidays in Te Urewera, which in 2014 had become the first ecosystem in the world to be designated as a legal entity.
No longer a stranger looking in from the outside, she was able to photograph the community almost without being noticed, giving her images a candid authenticity.
Later, she extended her project to encompass Ruatāhuna, another remote Tūhoe settlement, and completed the Lake Waikaremoana Great Walk.
Chypsanava’s daughter was 8 when she first accompanied her mother to meet the Teepa family. Now a teenager, she’s grown up “completely mesmerised” by the Māori world and the way she’s been accepted into the whānau. “It’s had a huge influence on her life; she always wants to go back.”
After losing her mother early, Chypsanava grew up immersed in nature with her father, whose stories she would later discover drew on Komi myths and legends. In recent years, she’s begun to piece together that side of her family’s story, reconnecting with her cousins and taking a DNA test.
Chypsanava’s work has featured in the New York Times, accompanying stories as diverse as New Zealand’s feijoa obsession and the North Canterbury Hunting Competition’s controversial inclusion of a category for children hunting feral cats. Her award-winning Tūhoe series has been published in New Zealand Geographic magazine.
She’s concerned that the current lack of funding for documentary photography in New Zealand will leave significant gaps in our archives unless the situation is addressed.
In the decade she’s been so intensely involved with Tūhoe, she’s witnessed the hard work being put in to create new business initiatives, restore the rainforest in their guardianship role as kaitiaki, and provide a pathway for the next generation.
“I see a lot of will and action from Tūhoe to succeed,” she says. “There’s so much effort and so much passion.
“By doing this project, I’m hoping to shine a light on something that is not really visible from the outside – the people who live there. For me, it’s the most incredible and interesting story.”
Joanna Wane is an award-winning senior lifestyle writer with a special interest in social issues and the arts.