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Stanley Greene Photojournalist Dies at 68 May 20, 2017

Posted by bohdan.warchomij in : Metaphor Online, New York Times , trackback

 

A Tribute to Stanley Greene, Teller of UncomfortableTruths

By James Estrin  

Stanley Greene, who started as a music and fashion photographer and later became one of the leading international conflict photographers, died Friday in Paris at age 68. A founding member of the photographer-owned agency Noor Images, he had been ill with liver cancer for several years, associates said.

Mr. Greene, one of the few African-American photographers who worked internationally, was known for his visceral and brutally honest photographs of wars, including conflicts in Chechnya, Georgia, Afghanistan and Iraq, that at times 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 Lens. “That is the job of a journalist, to upset your morning.”

Mr. Greene’s commitment to telling the unvarnished truth extended to his candid assessments of the ethical questions facing photojournalism. At times he seemed like an Old Testament prophet, willing to speak unsettling truths no matter the consequences. He railed against the use of 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.

“The public has lost trust in the media,” he told Lens in 2015. “We have to be ambassadors of the truth, 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,” this week compared Mr. Greene to a jazz musician.

“Stanley is like the Charles Mingus of photography,” said Mr. Kamber, the founder of the Bronx Documentary Center. “Stanley is about his heart, his emotions and his feelings. His photos are very impressionistic, like a stream of consciousness. Stanley was living on the front edge; all out, all the time. He wasn’t holding anything back for the future.”

Mr. Greene received numerous honors including the Eugene Smith Grant in 2004, the Lifetime Achievement Visa d’or Award in 2016 and five World Press Photo awards. His books include the autobiographical “Black Passport” and “Open Wound: Chechnya 1994-2003.” Anne Tucker, the former curator of photography for the Museum of Fine Arts, Houston, featured Mr. Greene in “War/Photography,” a comprehensive exhibit and book.

“You have to acknowledge the strength of his eye, his capacity to encompass issues in a picture frame — to understand a story and put it into visual terms — as well as his courage and tenacity,” Ms. Tucker said. “He was one of those journalists who went towards the bullet because that’s where the story was.”

What he was not, she said, was a good self-promoter. “He cared about the story, he cared about the issues, he cared about getting it right,” she explained.

Stanley Greene was born in Brooklyn on Valentine’s Day in 1949 and grew up in New Rochelle, N.Y. His father, also Stanley, was an actor, producer, filmmaker and director; while his mother, Javotee Sutton Greene, was an actress. His father, also an activist devoted to black culture, was blacklisted as a Communist in the 1950s and reduced to taking anonymous bit parts. Still, he had hoped his son would become an actor.

He 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, he 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 and photographed the local music scene. Among his early work was “The Western Front,” which chronicled the city’s punk scene in the 1970s and ’80s.

He cut as striking a figure as some of the acts 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 bandolier 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 traveled constantly, working extensively in Africa and the former Soviet Union. He was the only Western photographer in Russia’s White House 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 told Lens in 2010. “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 continue at Noor. “He was always my big brother,” Mr. van Lohuizen said in an interview on Thursday. “Stanley is my big brother, and Noor is his family”

The agency was born from a conversation between the two, who often worked together.

“Stanley and I wanted to be independent at the time of transition from analog to digital and from small agencies to a few large ones,” Mr. van Lohuizen said. “We believed that visual storytelling was the essence more than ever and that we should stake the ship and steer it in our own direction.”

In “Black Passport,” Mr. Greene talked candidly about how he felt while covering stories of violence or catastrophe in Rwanda, Chechnya, Haiti and New Orleans. He spoke just as openly about his personal life, including his marriages and numerous love affairs. His Noor colleague Nina Berman described him as “a hopeless romantic, forever falling madly in love — and being pained and hurt.”

He was a “gracious and generous mentor” and teacher to young photographers, she added, and one of “too few” black American photographers working internationally.

Not surprisingly, given the emotional and personal toll of his approach to life and work, along with the physical dangers, he 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 said in 2010. “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. 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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