Open Wound
Chechnya 1994 - 2003
Published on 1. January 2004
Book
Hardback
220 pages
978-1-904563-01-3 (ISBN)
Description
Renowned photojournalist Stanley Greene's unflinchingly honest images from four years covering the war in Chechnya.
The collapse of Russian communism in 1991 resounded to the shudder of an empire. It also sounded the death knell of the small, impoverished, forgotten land-locked state of Chechnya in the Caucasus, which had the misfortune to be of geopolitical importance.
Chechnya, whose population is mainly Muslim, reiterated its desire to become an independent state as it had already done 150 years earlier. In 1991, most Chechens were not aware of the economic stakes of oil and they were considered peasants who were just good at throwing clods of earth at the Russian cavalry. Today, they know what to expect.
A "lightning war" was launched against the Chechens in 1994, reducing the capital to a rat-infested pile of rubble. Grozny has become the Dresden of the Caucasus. Subsequently the Spetznatz, a Russian special forces unit, chained murders and kidnappings. No one was spared, neither men, nor women, nor children.
But the Chechens are not resigned. What is left in Grozny, the capital of Chechnya, is a vision of hell in the eyes of the survivors - pictured by Stanley Greene - that seems impossible to contemplate. What do the mothers of the Russian soldiers who have done this to Chechnya feel now about their sons?
Stanley Greene was born in New York in 1949. Twenty years later he was given a camera. Open Wound records nine years of the history of the Chechen rebellion through his eyes.
"... when you sit on the fence and watch genocide without doing anything about it, you are as guilty as those who are committing it." Stanley Greene
The collapse of Russian communism in 1991 resounded to the shudder of an empire. It also sounded the death knell of the small, impoverished, forgotten land-locked state of Chechnya in the Caucasus, which had the misfortune to be of geopolitical importance.
Chechnya, whose population is mainly Muslim, reiterated its desire to become an independent state as it had already done 150 years earlier. In 1991, most Chechens were not aware of the economic stakes of oil and they were considered peasants who were just good at throwing clods of earth at the Russian cavalry. Today, they know what to expect.
A "lightning war" was launched against the Chechens in 1994, reducing the capital to a rat-infested pile of rubble. Grozny has become the Dresden of the Caucasus. Subsequently the Spetznatz, a Russian special forces unit, chained murders and kidnappings. No one was spared, neither men, nor women, nor children.
But the Chechens are not resigned. What is left in Grozny, the capital of Chechnya, is a vision of hell in the eyes of the survivors - pictured by Stanley Greene - that seems impossible to contemplate. What do the mothers of the Russian soldiers who have done this to Chechnya feel now about their sons?
Stanley Greene was born in New York in 1949. Twenty years later he was given a camera. Open Wound records nine years of the history of the Chechen rebellion through his eyes.
"... when you sit on the fence and watch genocide without doing anything about it, you are as guilty as those who are committing it." Stanley Greene
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Person
Stanley Greene (February 14, 1949 - May 19, 2017) was an American photojournalist, he was a painter for many years before turning to photography in 1970. Two years later he enrolled in the School of Visual Arts in New York, and in 1973 transferred to Image Works in Cambridge, Massachusetts. In 1975 Greene enrolled in the San Francisco Art Institute where he received both a BFA and an MFA in photography by 1980. At the same time he co-founded Camera Work Gallery with five other photographers in San Francisco. In 1980, Greene began working for publications including the San Francisco Examiner and Rolling Stone. In 1986, he moved to Paris. While working for the Paris-based photo agency Agence Vu in October 1993, Greene was trapped and almost killed in the White House in Moscow during a stand-off between President Boris Yeltsin and the parliament. He covered the war-torn countries Azerbaijan, Bosnia and Herzegovina, Georgia, Iraq, Somalia, Croatia, Kashmir, and Lebanon.[3][4] He took pictures of the genocide in Rwanda in 1994[4] and the US Gulf Coast in the aftermath of Hurricane Katrina in 2005. Stanley Greene co-founded NOOR Agency with fellow photojournalist Kadir van Lohuizen in 2007. They launched their agency with their colleagues on September 7, 2007, at Visa Pour L'Image. Greene died in Paris, at the age of 68.