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NY Times, May 20 2017
Stanley Greene, Teller of Uncomfortable Truths, Dies at 68
By JAMES ESTRIN
Stanley Greene, whose visceral and brutally honest images of conflict
and his fearlessness in the most perilous of places made him one of the
leading war photographers of his generation, died on Friday in Paris. He
was 68.
A founding member of the photographer-owned agency Noor Images, Mr.
Greene, who lived in Paris, had been treated for liver cancer for
several years, associates said.
Mr. Greene was one of the few African-American photographers who worked
internationally. He traveled widely, making powerful images of conflicts
in Afghanistan, Iraq and the republics of Chechnya and Georgia, among
other places. Some pictures were too raw for many publications.
“You want to sit there comfortably with your newspaper and blueberry
muffin, and you don’t want to see pictures that are going to upset your
morning,” Mr. Greene said in a 2010 interview with the Lens blog of The
New York Times. “That is the job of a journalist, to upset your morning.”
Mr. Greene’s commitment to telling the unvarnished truth extended to his
assessments of the ethical questions facing photojournalism. He railed
against the use of computer programs like Photoshop to alter the scenes
of news images, a practice that he said turned photos into “cartoons.”
And he scorned photographers who staged images in an attempt to recreate
a missed moment after arriving late to a news scene.
“We have to be ambassadors of the truth,” he told Lens in 2015. “We have
to hold ourselves to a higher standard, because the public no longer
trusts the media. We are considered merchants of misery and therefore
get a bad rap.”
Mr. Greene had once aspired to be a painter, like Matisse, or a
musician, like Jimi Hendrix, but he discovered his true instrument the
first time he picked up a camera, he told Michael Kamber in the 2010
Lens interview. Mr. Kamber, a former conflict photographer himself and
the author of “Photojournalists on War: The Untold Stories From Iraq,”
compared Mr. Greene to a jazz musician.
“Stanley is like the Charles Mingus of photography,” Mr. Kamber, the
founder of the Bronx Documentary Center, said in an interview this week.
“Stanley is about his heart, his emotions and his feelings. His photos
are very impressionistic, like a stream of consciousness.”
Among the many honors Mr. Greene received were five World Press Photo
awards. His books include the autobiographical “Black Passport” and
“Open Wound: Chechnya 1994-2003.” Anne Tucker, former curator of
photography for the Museum of Fine Arts, Houston, featured Mr. Greene in
“War/Photography,” a comprehensive exhibition and book.
“He was one of those journalists who went toward the bullet,” Ms. Tucker
said, “because that’s where the story was.”
Stanley Greene was born in Brooklyn on Feb. 14, 1949, and grew up in New
Rochelle, N.Y. His father, also Stanley, was an actor, producer,
filmmaker and director; his mother, Javotee Sutton Greene, was an
actress. His father, an activist devoted to black culture, was
blacklisted as a Communist in the 1950s and was reduced to taking
anonymous bit parts.
The younger Mr. Greene had a “somewhat privileged yet traumatic
childhood,” said his longtime friend Jules Allen. “There was a
loneliness there that was insatiable, but he was blessed enough to at
least partially deal with his pain through photography.”
As a teenager, Mr. Greene joined the Black Panthers and was active in
the antiwar movement. His dreams of becoming a painter gave way to
photography, and he was encouraged in that pursuit by the renowned
photojournalist W. Eugene Smith.
In the 1970s, Mr. Allen and Mr. Greene shared a darkroom and a studio in
San Francisco while Mr. Greene studied photography at the San Francisco
Art Institute. Some of his early work was published in “The Western
Front,” a book that chronicled the city’s punk music scene in the 1970s
and ’80s.
He cut as striking a figure as some of the musicians he photographed.
“Stanley was a punk rocker who drove a Mustang,” Mr. Allen said. “He
wore a black leather motorcycle jacket, a black beret, two scarves,
three watches and four bracelets, as well as two great cameras and a
bandoleer of film strapped across his chest.”
Mr. Greene worked as a fashion photographer in the 1980s and moved to
Paris, where he later joined the Vu photo agency. He worked extensively
in Africa and the former Soviet Union. He was the only Western
photographer in Russia’s White House in 1993 during an attempted coup
against the president, Boris Yeltsin. Trapped inside, amid shelling and
gunfire, Mr. Greene continued to photograph throughout the building,
capturing two images that received World Press Photo awards.
“The fact that I thought I was going to die gave me courage,” he wrote
in “Black Passport.” “Courage is control of fear. I think that this
incident is the one that steeled me. I’m no hero, but it made me so that
once I commit to a story, I have to see it through.”
A 1992 Moscow encounter with Kadir van Lohuizen, a fellow member of Vu,
marked the beginning of a close friendship that would lead to their
founding Noor Images in Amsterdam, a collective of photojournalists.
Given the emotional toll and the physical dangers of his work, Mr.
Greene discouraged others from following in his footsteps.
“Though I’m bombarded by young photographers who ask me how to become a
conflict photographer, I tell them, ‘Get a life,’” he wrote in “Black
Passport.” “If they persist, I tell them about the consequences. I tell
them there is no glory.”
Even as his health was failing, Mr. Greene continued to work, returning
last month from a road trip through northern Russia, where he and Maria
Turchenkova began a project on the 100th anniversary of the Russian
Revolution.
At the end of “Black Passport,” Mr. Greene reflected on the centrality
of storytelling to the human experience. Wars are fought, he said,
because people have different views of the same story.
“Photography is my language and it gives me the power to tell what
otherwise is not told,” he said. “Eugene Smith told me vision is a gift,
and you have to give something back. He haunts me like that. It’s not
the bang-bang that compels me. It never was. At the end of the day it is
not about death, it is about life.
“The quest is to try to understand why human beings behave the way they
do,” he continued. “The question is, How does this happen? And
sometimes, the only way to find out is to go to where it is happening.
One day the neighbors are talking to each other over the fence, and the
next they are shooting at each other. Why is it that we don’t consider
life precious, and instead we literally let it drip through our fingers?”
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