(Black Passport is his autobiographical monograph-cum-scra...)
Black Passport is his autobiographical monograph-cum-scrapbook, and it transports the viewer behind the news as Greene reflects upon his career, oscillating between the relative safety of life in the West and the traumas of wars abroad. This glimpse of the polarities that have comprised Greene's life raises essential questions about the role of the photojournalist, as well as concerns about its repercussions: what motivates someone to willingly confront death and misery? To do work that risks one's life? Is it political engagement, or a sense of commitment to telling difficult stories? Or does being a war photographer simply satisfy a yearning for adventure? Black Passport offers an experience that is both exceptionally personal and ostensibly objective. Built around Greene's narrating monologue, the book's 26 short, nonsequential "scenes" are each illustrated by a portfolio of his work.
Stanley Norman Greene was a former Black Panther who became a celebrated international photojournalist, portraying war, poverty and disaster in Chechnya, Afghanistan, Iraq and the US Gulf Coast after Hurricane Katrina.
Background
Stanley Greene, Jr. was born on February 14, 1949 in Brooklyn, New York, United States. Both his parents were actors and social activists. His father, who was blacklisted for his political beliefs in the 1950s, had roles in the films For Love of Ivy and The Wiz.
Education
Stanley Greene, Jr. studied at the School of Visual Arts in New York City (1971-1972), in Cambridge, Massachusetts (1972-1974), and the San Francisco Art Institute, where he received his Bachelor of Fine Arts in photography in 1978.
In his youth, Greene dabbled in radical politics and spent time in a psychiatric hospital before becoming an assistant to the acclaimed photojournalist W Eugene Smith in the early 1970s. He chronicled the punk rock scene in San Francisco in the 1970s and early 1980s before moving to Paris, where he worked as a fashion photographer.
Career
His career in photojournalism began as "an accident" when he was 40. He was on assignment in East Berlin in 1989 when the moment the Berlin Wall was breached. His photograph of a young woman in a tutu on top of the wall was reprinted all over the world. She was above the scrawled phrase "Kisses to All," waving a bottle of champagne as guards descended on her.
Stanley Greene took his cameras to countries including Croatia, Kashmir, Afghanistan and Lebanon. He covered genocide in Rwanda and strife in Azerbaijan, Iraq and Syria. In Mali in the early 1990s, he saw children dying of starvation, flies crawling across their faces. In 1993, he was the only western journalist inside the Russian parliament building when it came under siege during a violent coup attempt that left almost 200 dead.
Stanley Greene travelled more than 20 times to Chechnya, where he chronicled the devastation wrought by Russian troops as they battled separatists in the former Soviet republic. His 2003 book Open Wound: Chechnya 1994 to 2003 was "a testament to the fact that photography's moral force is alive and well," the Toronto Star foreign correspondent Olivia Ward wrote in 2004.
Stanley Greene was one of the few western journalists in Fallujah, Iraq, in 2004, when four US contractors were killed. Their bodies were burned and then hung from a bridge. "It was the most horrendous thing to see," he said. "The people were standing around – they were like at a barbecue."
Shortly after Hurricane Katrina flooded New Orleans and the Gulf Coast in 2005, Stanley Greene was there to photograph the physical and psychic damage. He returned for the next five years, showing how the lives of thousands of people had been forever changed.
Stanley Greene published a photographic memoir, Black Passport. He often spoke at international photography conferences.
In recent years, he had documented the environmental and human cost of the digital age, travelling to Nigeria, India, China and Pakistan, where people salvaged discarded electronic devices from waste dumps. He said he was not interested in quick-hit photography but preferred deep-immersion assignments in which he could explore complex visual tales.
(Black Passport is his autobiographical monograph-cum-scra...)
Views
Quotations:
"I honestly believe photography is 75 per cent chance and 25 per cent skill."
"In accidents, we really discover the magic of photography."
"I have been accused of having lost my objectivity, but when you sit on a fence and watch genocide without doing anything about it, you are as guilty as those who are committing it."
Membership
Greene is on the board of directors of Camera work Gallery in San Francisco and on the board of trustees and college committee of the San Francisco Art Institute.
Personality
As a photographer, Stanley Greene was a strict classicist of the old school: He preferred shooting film on Leica and Nikon cameras and detested the digital manipulation of images. But as a journalist who walked into war zones with only his cameras, he didn't believe there was such a thing as impartiality.
Quotes from others about the person
His friend and colleague Kadir van Lohuizen: "He was very charismatic."
Connections
Stanley Greene, Jr. was married at least twice, had numerous girlfriends over the years but no children.