Festival
Charlottesville 2012:
Stanley Greene
New Orleans, LA. The Lower 9th Ward. A Katrina mud covered flag is strewn in a church in the lower 9th ward. No one had begun to clean it up or renovate it as of 2007 when this image was made. © Stanley Greene / Noor
Soukh ash-Shouyoukh, Northern Iraq, April 2004..Road side bombing attack on a pipe-line. © Stanley Greene / Noor
Grozny, Chechnya. January 1995. Food and water supplies stopped within days of the assault. Men and women searched for sustenance among exploding shells. Gaining control of Grozny did not take the Russians hours, but weeks. The Chechens were difficult to beat because they did not engage in conventional warfare. During the siege the bulk of the rebels were training south of the city; General Maskhadov knew that a large, poorly armed force could have been ring-fenced and trapped with relative ease. Most importantly, previous city surveyors and town planners were now fighters, giving the Chechen command intimate knowledge of the hidden arteries and conduits of the city's gas and water systems. Day and night they infiltrated Russian lines with hundreds of three-man hit teams popping out of nowhere, typically two riflemen protecting a fighter with anti-tank rockets. Countless Russian armoured personnel carriers were destroyed at intersections and strategic points with huge casualties. © Stanley Greene / Noor
July 25th, 2011 Guvecci, Turkey..Jisr Shughur, Syrian Border village...School for Syrian refugees who cross over from the border camp. © Stanley Greene / Noor
Kabul, Afghanistan - July 2008. Russian Cultural Center (RCC). Over 600 registered drug users frequent the RCC, 250 persons shoot up heroin, 350 eat or smoke opium, at least about 200 addicts live here full time. Drug users living in the Culture center are afghans, but most are returning from other countries with addictions, they arrived as refugees from outside of Afghanistan and came to Kabul to improve their lives, but have fallen deeper into their addictions. The Russian Culture center has become over run by squatting junkies, the horror and degradation cannot be expressed in any language, the local people of Kabul think the junkies living in the center are not good Muslims. In a sentence, going into this place, is like taking a elevator straight to hell - Aidan Hartley: The Zanzibar Chest. © Stanley Greene / Noor
Portrait of Stanley Greene
New Orleans, LA. The Lower 9th Ward. A Katrina mud covered flag is strewn in a church in the lower 9th ward. No one had begun to clean it up or renovate it as of 2007 when this image was made. © Stanley Greene / Noor
Stanley Greene has called a camera in the right hands the most powerful weapon ever made. Greeneʼs hands are definitely the right ones. Over the last two decades, he has brought back haunting images from troubled places like Croatia, Rwanda, and the post-Katrina Gulf Coast. His photographs are iconic, but they can also make you sweat: drug addicts squat in a hovel in Kabul; men flee a fiery explosion in Kirkuk, Iraq; a dirty American flag is draped over a pew in a New Orleans church still in ruins two years after Hurricane Katrina. Greene has covered wars, migrations, drug-use, and long invasions, perhaps most notably in his work in Chechnya. A firm believer that photographers should not just parachute into a place and then leave when the next story comes along, Greene spent more than a decade documenting Chechnyaʼs struggle for independence from Russia. “He stands his ground,” notes guest curator David Griffin. “Heʼs very impassioned and refuses to compromise his values.”
Greene did not start his career photographing conflict–rather, his early work chronicled the rock music and fashion scenes. Black Passport, his most recent book, tells the story of his transformation to photographer through a series of vignettes: in one scene, a would-be model girlfriend helps him make inroads to the fashion world in Paris. In another, he finds himself near the Berlin Wall as it falls in 1989 and takes a photograph that is used all over the world to symbolize the event. In Scene 17, he cries after seeing the charred bodies of some American security officers in Fallujah. The book, deeply personal, raises important questions about the role of the photojournalist in covering traumas and wars and about the effect of confronting death and misery. “I think you can only keep positive for eight years,” he says. “If you stay longer than that, you turn. And not into a beautiful butterfly.”
Born in New York in 1949, Greene spent his youth rallying for the anti-war movement and the Black Panthers. He was also a founding member of SF Camerawork, an exhibition space for avant-garde photography. Currently, he is a founding member of Noor Images. He has won five World Press Photo awards, the W. Eugene Smith Award (2004), and a Katrina Media Fellowship from the Open Society Institute (2006). His work has been exhibited at museums and festivals all over the world, including Centre dʼart contemporain de Saint-Restitut, France; Noorderlicht Gallery, The Netherlands; and Musee dʼart contemporain de Lyon, France. He has published a photo book on Chechnya, Open Wound, and more recently, Black Passport (2010).
EXHIBITION
Black Passport
June 1-29, 2012
306 Main Street Gallery (Bank of America building)
Charlottesvilles, VA
USA
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